NewChinese keen on home purchases, survey shows

To gauge Chinese people’s demand for domestic and overseas housing, the South China Morning Post and Century 21 China Real Estate have partnered on a quarterly sentiment survey.

In the eighth poll conducted in Beijing and Shanghai in the fourth quarter of last year, 401 Century 21 clients responded, compared with 304 in the third quarter.

The latest survey showed sentiment on home purchases improved significantly as a record 40 per cent of the respondents said they would like to buy a home in the next three months, up from 13 per cent a quarter earlier.

Sixty-one per cent of the respondents said they could afford homes worth less than 30,000 yuan (HK$35,400) per square metre, compared with 27 per cent previously, suggesting an erosion in affordability.

The findings match those of an official survey by the People’s Bank of China in the fourth quarter, which showed 52 per cent of the respondents regarded home prices as “unacceptably high”, up 2.4 percentage points from the third quarter, and only 3.8 per cent considered them “satisfactory”.

Ding Zuyu, co-president for E-House (China), expects the strong sales growth in 2015 could not be sustained this year due to a high base, but the overall market will stay stable with a neutral outlook on the back of continued policy support, according to Jefferies.