Shenzhen old home prices jumped 10 per cent in April, with business loans being used for speculative buying
- Average lived-in home price in Nanshan, Shenzhen’s most expensive district, jumped 16.1 per cent year on year
- Regulators needed to step up supervision to maintain ‘healthy housing market’: analyst
The prices of old homes in Shenzhen jumped 10.3 per cent year on year on average in April, pushed up by easing measures introduced by the People’s Bank of China to boost the economy amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The prices were 1.7 per cent higher than March and topped those recorded in the 70 major cities tracked by the country’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which released the figures on Monday.
The secondary market is free of government intervention. “We have recently seen clear instances of speculation in Shenzhen, in particular,” said Yan Yueijin, director of E-house China Research and Development Institute, adding that regulators needed to step up supervision to maintain a “healthy housing market in the city”.
The average lived-in home price in Nanshan, Shenzhen’s most expensive district and home to technology behemoths such as Tencent Holdings, ZTE and drone maker DJI, for instance, jumped 16.1 per cent year on year to 101,000 yuan per square metre at the end of April.
Flats in the city’s wealthier districts have seen heavy speculative buying since late March. On April 3, Beijing released 400 billion yuan in additional liquidity into the banking system to help small and medium-sized businesses during the pandemic. But banks in Shenzhen, China’s technology hub, had already granted 315.8 billion yuan worth of new loans in the first quarter of 2020, an increase of 71.8 billion yuan from the same period last year.
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