Xicheng district in Beijing records China’s fastest home price rise this year - report

Beijing’s Xicheng tops a list of 226 districts across 23 mainland cities in terms of annual housing inflation of 33.9 per cent in the first eight months, a special report by Hong Kong-based consultancy Real Estate Foresight showed.

Their average new home price gain was only 1.8 per cent. Gainers outnumbered losers by 123 versus 103. The worst performer suffered a fall of 33.6 per cent.

“Performance within a city can vary widely across different districts,” said the consultancy’s founder and chief analyst Robert Ciemniak.

Because of that, he said it was important for investors to ask themselves whether their projects are in any of the top districts or whether the listed developers they are exposed to have significant active selling projects in these districts.

Ranking second and third are Nanshan and Luohu districts in Shenzhen, while four districts in Shanghai are among the top 10.

Apart from annual price change, the report also ranks the districts in five other ways, including annual gross floor area sales growth, year-to-date absolute sales volume, and three-month sequential changes in price, sales and volume.

Bao’an in Shenzhen stands out as the only one that ranks in the top 50 on each of the six measures, followed by Longgang in the same city, Huiji in Zhengzhou, Jianghan in Wuhan, the high-tech district in Xi’an, Pudong in Shanghai and Jianggan in Hangzhou as performing well on a combined set of ranks, although very few of them score high on any single rank.

There is no dominant district that would clearly score best across all six measures consistently, the report found.

Shijingshan district in Beijing is the No 1 in terms of sales volume growth in the first eight months from a year earlier as well as sequential growth in the three months ending August.