Shanghai Home Sales Hit Lowest Mark in 18 Weeks – and more of Today’s China Real Estate Links | August 15, 2012

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

• Shanghai Home Sales Hit Lowest Mark in 18 Weeks

  NEW home purchases dropped to the lowest in 18 weeks in Shanghai amid insufficient supply while the unfavorable weather also hit buying interest, data showed yesterday. The sales of new homes, excluding government-subsidized affordable housing, plunged one third from a week earlier to 142,400 square meters during the seven days ended on Sunday, Shanghai Deovolente Realty Co said. “The weekly volume was the lowest since mid April,” said Lu Qilin, a Deovolente researcher. “An inadequate supply of mid to low-end homes since the beginning of this month contributed to the decline while the arrival of Typhoon Haikui also confined many people at home.”

• China banks face rising bad-loan risk

  Financial regulators need to step up their risk prevention efforts as China’s commercial banks face increasing levels of nonperforming assets due to slower economic growth and the rising operational difficulties of local companies, the state-run Financial News said in a commentary published Tuesday. The front-page commentary called for closer cooperation among the central bank and local governments as well as the banking, securities and insurance regulators. As of the end of June, commercial banks in China had 452.8 billion yuan ($71.13 billion) in outstanding nonperforming loans, up CNY28.7 billion from the end of last year, according to the newspaper, which is run by the country’s central bank.

• China July electricity usage up 4.5% vs. year-ago

  China’s electricity consumption in July totaled 455.6 billion kilowatt hours, up 4.5% from a year earlier, the National Energy Administration said in a statement Tuesday. The growth accelerated from 4.3% in June but remained below an average increase of 11.7% in 2011. January-July consumption totaled 2.83 trillion kWh, up 5.4%.

• China Daily Predicts Further Curbs on Real Estate Sales

  Officials in some provincial governments have already been given warnings by the central government that they are not adhering strictly enough to curbs and policies introduced to keep property prices in check. According to reports, 16 inspection teams sent out in July to check whether policies were being followed are back in Beijing after gauging the scale of the recent property price upturn as a result of lax implementation of government policy. The investigators are believed to be preparing their reports, and these are expected to shape future property policy, which is now widely predicted to see some further tightening.

• Coldwell Banker teams up with BOC to entice rich Chinese

  Coldwell Banker France said Monday it had teamed up with Bank of China to meet the growing appetite of rich Chinese for upmarket French property. “France now represents a preferred destination for China’s newly wealthy,” the head of the French unit of the US real estate agency, Laurent Demeure, told AFP. With more than 800,000 millionaires, he said wealthy Chinese represent an important future source of demand for the top-end of the French real estate market, as they already are in the United States where they account for over half of purchases by non-residents.

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