Beijing’s used-home buyers bide their time as cooling measures bring prices steadily down
With units in the secondary market down 15pc from their peak, new-home prices in China’s capital are increasingly irrelevant for most buyers, say analysts
Wang Jian, a 29-year-old working for a Beijing technology company, saw his hopes of buying a flat in the capital evaporate overnight when strict new cooling measures left him unable to afford the down payment.
He had already paid the deposit on a 7.4 million yuan, 80 square-metre flat in the city’s Shaoyaoju neighbourhood when the new policy raising the minimum requirement from 40 to 80 per cent added 2.9 million yuan to his down payment. He had no choice but to pull out of the deal.
I’m not in a hurry now because I see no prospect of prices going up this year
Nine months on, and with average secondary home prices down about 15 per cent from their peak in April, Wang is glad he missed out back in March.
When he looked for flats of a similar size in Shaoyaoju recently, he found the average price had fallen 17.4 per cent, from 92,300 to 76,280 yuan per sq m.
“I’m not in a hurry now because I see no prospect of prices going up this year,” he said.
Wang is one of Beijing’s many “wait-and-see” homeseekers who have been sitting on the sidelines watching their purchasing power grow as the measures to rein in property prices have steadily taken effect.
According to 5i5j, a major housing agent in the capital, prices of second-hand homes have declined for eight straight months and are now down 15 per cent from April’s peak. Turnover fell by a half last year to 136,237 units, from 272,434 in the whole of 2016.