NewMainland Chinese show record high interest in buying and trading up homes, survey shows
Last poll indicates ordinary mainlanders have no plan to buy homes offshore in next three months
To gauge the buying demand among mainland Chinese for domestic and overseas residential properties, the South China Morning Post and consultancy Century 21 China Real Estate have partnered on a quarterly sentiment survey.
In the seventh poll conducted in Beijing and Shanghai in the third quarter, 304 Century 21 clients responded, compared with 181 in the second quarter.
The latest one showed 13 per cent of the respondents would like to buy a home in the next three months, which was the highest level in the survey’s history.
Also hitting the record level was the proportion of buyers who already owned a home and would like to trade up for a new, better and bigger one.
The high home buying sentiment is at odds with the results from an official poll by the People’s Bank of China, which indicated 13.8 per cent of 20,000 households in 50 major cities said they planned to buy a home in the next three months, down from 14.7 per cent in the second quarter.
But the official survey found that 49.7 per cent of the respondents regarded home prices as “unacceptably high” , as compared with 51.5 per cent in the second quarter.