Xian in grip of housing boom after aggressive growth plan brings in hundreds of thousands of new residents
Despite central government efforts to curb property speculation, Xian’s strategy of lowering the barriers to securing residency have seen the northwestern city’s property prices soar
It came as little surprise to the young civil servant that almost as soon as he had put down the deposit for a second-hand flat in Xian, the real estate agency cancelled the transaction.
It was the third time this had happened and the 28-year-old, surnamed Yan, viewed each cancellation as an omen.
After each of his attempts to complete a housing purchase, the price of the property had jumped, and the price is now 30 per cent higher than it was three months earlier.
“The sellers just want to wait for the price to rise further,” Yan said. “They have seen that hundreds of thousands of new qualified buyers are heating up the property market.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping has repeatedly called for houses that “are for living in, not for speculation”, and during a meeting at the end of July, the Politburo, China’s top decision-making body, said it was determined to resolve the housing problem and “firmly” curb rises in property prices.
But local government have come up with increasingly creative ways to circumvent central government policy prescriptions, often leading to the opposite result to the one Beijing wants to achieve.
Xian has found a particularly clever way to bypass Beijing’s crackdown on property fever by sharply lowering the barrier to new city residents.