China to carry out property checks
Focus on cleanup of idle land parcels, ensuring affordable housing, land supply
(SHANGHAI) China will carry out a nationwide property inspection on the implementation of the government’s real-estate measures, the China Daily reported yesterday, citing unidentified people from the property industry.
The ‘large-scale’ inspection will focus on local government efforts to ensure land supply, construction of affordable housing, and the cleanup of idle land parcels, the official English language newspaper reported. The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and the Ministry of Land and Resources will carry out the inspections, it said, without giving a timeframe.
‘The government wants to check out the market before setting up next year’s real-estate plans,’ said Liu Kun, a property analyst at Great Wall Securities Co based in Shenzhen. ‘The construction of low-income affordable homes to increase supply will be the government’s focus in the future.’
China is clamping down on land hoarding after record land prices fuelled the risk of a housing bubble. The government last month raised interest rates for the first time in three years, and has suspended mortgages for third-home purchases and pledged to speed up trials of property taxes this year to restrain foreign capital and cool property prices. Prices rose for a 17th month in October, by 8.6 per cent from a year ago.
The central bank ordered lenders last Friday to set aside larger reserves for the second time in two weeks.
China’s government conducts land and property inspections on a regular basis, though they are rarely carried out jointly by the Housing and Land Ministries, Mr Liu said.
China will bar companies that have held land for more than a year without developing it from buying additional plots, seeking a ‘reasonable’ correction in the nation’s home prices, the government announced on Sept 27.
It will increase land available for smaller, affordable apartments in cities with high prices, and no parcel should be used to build large, high-end homes before the supply of government-supported housing is met, it added.
Developers and their controlling shareholders won’t be allowed to participate in land auctions until they’ve taken measures to rectify issues regarding their unused land, the government said in the same statement. The ban also applies to companies found with irregularities such as forged documents.
China found 3,070 cases of land misuse nationwide as of the end of May, with 2,815 of them involving undeveloped plots, Liao Yonglin, land-use director of the Land Ministry, said at a briefing on Aug 19. — Bloomberg
Source: Business Times, 25 Nov 2010
