Mainland banks in Shanghai's red-hot housing market lent 99.58 billion yuan (HK$113.2 billion) in new mortgages last year, up dramatically from 5.8 billion yuan in 2008, as home seekers rushed to buy and prices hit new highs.
The banks lent 38.93 billion yuan to buyers of new residential properties and 60.65 billion yuan to buyers of second-hand homes, the Shanghai office of the People's Bank of China said yesterday.
Lending soared more than 1,600 per cent compared with 2008, when the property market and overall economy were hit hard by the global financial crisis, the central bank said.
Analysts said the sharp increase in the city was in line with the national surge in home mortgages.
'At the end of 2009, outstanding medium- and long-term consumer loans [nationwide] stood at 4.9 trillion yuan, an increase of 1.588 trillion yuan from the end of the previous year,' Xavier Wong, the director and head of research of property consultancy Knight Frank's Greater China division, said. 'In 2008, outstanding medium- and long-term consumer loans increased by only 345 billion yuan. Housing mortgage loans account for about 99 per cent of medium- and long-term consumer loans in China.'
The increase was helped by lower tax charges and looser credit policies introduced by the central and local governments in late 2008, he said.
In November, the average price of new homes in urban Shanghai was 31,209 yuan per square metre, up 68 per cent from 2008, Knight Frank said.