Even China’s population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country’s crisis-hit property market.
China’s property sector, once the pillar of the economy, has slumped since 2021 when real estate giant China Evergrande Group (3333.HK) defaulted on its debt obligations following a clampdown on new borrowing.
Big-name developers such as Country Garden Holdings (2007.HK) continue to teeter close to default even to this day, keeping home-buyer sentiment depressed.
As of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show.
That would be equal to 7.2 million homes, according to Reuters calculations, based on the average home size of 90 square metres.
The world is really lucky that China’s not doing that great at the moment. Not so long ago, China was winning the propaganda war internationally.
You don’t want authoritarianism to win the argument by out-performing democracies.
I agree. I don’t think we had or have anything to fear. The Chinese educational system is built around obedience, cultural homogeneity, and rote learning. Sure, there are fewer protests, and there is less crime, but also a SEVERE lack of innovation. I can count on one hand the number of innovations China has exported to the world in the last decade. Everything they build of note is based on stolen IP and figurative and literal slave labour. The world is finally clamping down on the former, and China’s social progression to a service-based economy is putting an end to the latter. Their comparative competitive advantages are eroding by the day.
They’ve hit the middle income trap while simultaneously upsetting all their trading partners. It’s not going to be a pretty fall from grace. Fake numbers saying how awesome things are only work for so long.
Why doesn’t China count as a democracy? People vote and the votes get counted and decide who runs things.
Why doesn’t North Korea count as a democracy? People vote and the votes get counted and decide who runs things. /s
Hmm, why isn’t the one-party state is considered a democracy? Truly baffling.
Why do you think voting for party is the only form of democracy?
Why don’t you?
good to know Earth resources are used in rational and sustainable manner.
The half finished apartment complexes and ones that are collapsing already because they build them with bamboo instead of cement would indicate otherwise. Look up tofu-dreg projects/buildings for a good laugh. So much of the rapid construction done in the last 20-30 years in China is going to be in landfills far before it should be…
When you make the only safe place for money real estate, then your corrupt Politicians make that only safe for the wealthy and connected, you end up with a lot of empty useless real estate.
Are you talking about China or Toronto?
Considering China’s population shrank by nearly 1 million last year and it predicted to drop by ~700 million by 2100.
This is not going to get better.
For many mainland Chinese people, real estate is the only place they can invest their money. Traditionally and culturally it’s also seen as the only possible way to rise up and do better.
The money export controls make it difficult for the average guy to move his money abroad as well.
So there are many Chinese people putting retirement or family savings into these places because they don’t have other options.
They have also just had a very long run of easy government backed mortgage support, making it a bit too easy to borrow money for these properties.
It’s crazy and doesn’t make long term sense when the number of domiciles exceeds the number of people.
Wait so China might be having an economic crisis in coming years?
Can… can they move those apartments here?
No need, just need to force them to sell their property here along with all the other rich people who are holding on to vacant property as an investment. There are plenty of homes in most places if they’d do something like double the property tax on any property that’s vacant more than a few months per year.
It’s almost as if the idea of endless growth is a bad one…
but GrOwTh
What will we ever do without gRoWtH
Nah. China’s urbanization rate is currently 65%. South Korea for comparison has 82% urbanization rate. So the Chinese have plenty more (say, a hundred million or so more) homes to build. The current difficulties are more to do with (i) loss of consumer confidence caused by the leadership’s bad economic management, and (ii) the deliberate restriction of credit to developers because of the government’s concerns about debt.
This analysis reminds me of the hoo-hah about China’s “ghost cities” circa 2010. Those ghost cities ended up being filled up.
It’s not for them. It’s so they can buy them and charge exorbitant rents to the next generation looking for a place to call their own, but can’t afford one of their own.
There is no next generation to rent them to…China’s population is shrinking.
Doubt they have that multi-generational 4D chess in mind
