Given its status as a government mouthpiece, I’m not really sure if recent criticism of real estate investment figures from China’s National Bureau of Statistics makes Xinhua (the Chinese news agency) a pot or a kettle, but it’s nonetheless encouraging to see any drive for reliable data from a government office.
As announced last week by Xinhua, and published in the People’s Daily, a recent article from the China Economic Weekly appears to demonstrate that the nation’s land transaction value for the first six months of 2013, as published by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), was at odds with both the data from other ministries, as well as historical data from recent years. The Bureau’s figures were also quite different from estimates from real estate consultancies researching the market.
According to the Bureau’s most recent report, the total transaction value of land sales in China reached RMB 369.9 billion yuan from January to the end of June 2013 — a 20.3 percent increase over the same period in 2012.
However, according to reports from Beijing-based 5i5j.com, based on the weekly reported land transfer for 306 cities in China, land sales revenue reached RMB 1.13 trillion for the period. Another consultancy, K8.cn, reported that land transfes in 100 cities sampled reached RMB 762.9 billion during the period.
Other government ministries also brought the figures from the Statistics Bureau into question. Data from the Ministry of Finance indicate that total revenues from land transfers reached RMB 2.89 last year, and the Ministry of Land and Resources (who presumably were reporting on the same set of transactions) reported RMB 2.55 trillion for 2012.
Given the surge in prices paid for land during 2013, unless the quantity of transactions or the amount of land being sold had dropped off precipitously since last year, then the Bureau of Statistics figures seem to be off-base.
According to Xinhua, officials from the bureau clarified that their reports were based only on land sold for real estate development and excluded land sold for industrial purposes. However, the amount of land sold each year in China for manufacturing purposes has, by all indications, been low this year, and the price paid for industrial land is generally much less than that paid for commercial or residential development.
All of this variation regarding land sales data is particularly disturbing given the attempts by the Chinese government in recent years to improve transparency surrounding land sales. Since 2007, all land sales have been required to be done via public auction with announcement made on websites for each city regarding the size, location and price paid for each plot, along with other details.
If all of this information is supposedly public and transparent, then the inability of government ministries charged with regulating these sales indicates the challenges involved in predicting or even understanding the real estate market in China.
However, the criticism of the Bureau of Statistics by Xinhua at least brings some hope that voices within the government are pushing for better reporting on the real estate market. And we’ll do our best here at Mingtiandi to keep you up to date on any progress towards this greater transparency.
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