Beijing office rent market slowing down – and more of Today’s China Real Estate Links | March 7, 2013

Here is a list of the day’s latest China real estate news collected from around the web:

• Beijing office rent market slowing down

  Beijing’s market for premium office space, which has seen an acceleration in prices and rents over the past three years, is slowing down, but sustained demand and limited supply is expected to raise the overall rental level in the city over the next couple of years.

  Sun Xiaodong, a managing director of an immigration company in Beijing, has been looking for a new office in the city’s central business district (CBD) for months. He is not happy with the property management service in the office building he currently works in and wishes to move after his lease ends next month.

• Tax fails to end Chinese love of property

  Wang Ying and Du Bibo only married a fortnight ago but already they are lining up in the divorce registry office in Shanghai’s Xuhui district to dissolve their marriage.
  With big smiles on their faces – a facial expression that marks them out as not your normal warring couple – they explain that the mortgage officer at their bank recommended divorce as the best way around a new property tax.

  A capital gains tax on housing sales was intended to cool China’s sizzling property market, but since it was announced last Friday it has had the exact opposite effect: a panic has been unleashed.

• Billionaire Couple’s Soho China Shares Rise On Profits

  Shares in Soho China, the Hong Kong-listed real estate developer controlled by Beijing billionaire couple Zhang Xin and Pan Shiyi, climbed 6.7% today after the company said its profit for 2012 bulged by 172% from a year earlier to $1.7 billion in part on the completion of a high-profile project designed by architect Zaha Hadid.

  After subtracting out its valuation gains on its investment properties, Soho’s net profit rose by 135% to $538 million, the company said.   Revenue last year increased by 169% to $2.5 billion.

• No need to fear China’s housing crackdown

  New measures to cool China’s housing market have triggered fresh volatility and stock declines across Asia. But we think the latest government moves won’t derail the long-term drivers of Chinese real estate growth.

  How quickly things change in China. After house prices grew at nearly 1 per cent a month in 2011, investors worried that the market was overheating. Then, last year, fears that the government would clamp down on the market prompted a slump in real estate stocks, which later bounced back when the market didn’t collapse. Now, as new fears of a bubble prompted more mortgage restrictions, stocks across Asia dropped and Chinese property developers tumbled sharply again.

• China’s real estate market reacts to new measures

  China’s real estate market has actively responded to a series of measures aimed at controlling housing prices issued by the State Council, China’s cabinet, on Friday.

  Daily inquiries and demand for housing purchases on Saturday, just one day after the new policy came out, rose by 30 percent from Friday, according to Hu Jinghui, vice president of 5i5j Real Estate, a leading real estate agency in Beijing.

  Hu forecast that the trading volume of second-hand housing would hit a new high before detailed rules on the real estate market are implemented by local governments and government departments.

This list is updated daily, so tune in again tomorrow for more up to date information, or subscribe to our daily email news digest to get this delivered to your mailbox.