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.
If you’re American, the problem here actually isn’t the number of residences, there are plenty of those. The problem is that developers only want to invest in single family units or high value apartments. We need policy makers who will actually tax absentee landlords and developers of high value properties to the point that local developers begin seeing more profit in creating affordable housing. In fact, affordable housing can be some of the most profitable even without increased tax burden but try convincing a group of investors that.