WSJ - China’s Ghost Cities to Get Spookier...
CLSA analyst Nicole Wong and a team of analysts spent a year on the ground in China, examining 810,000 property units at more than 600 projects across a dozen cities.
...
China’s vacancy rate for property completed in the past five years is 15% –equivalent to 10.2 million empty units. While that rate isn’t especially troubling yet—it’s 10% in the U.S.—what is worrisome, Ms. Wong suggests, is the fact that it is rising and
expected to exceed 20% between 2016 and 2017, largely buoyed by overinvestment.
...
Ms. Wong argues that these excess empty units reflect too much spending on property; China last year spent
12% of its gross-domestic product on new home sales—the highest level ever—which she called unsustainable.
While mature markets like the U.S. show periodic upticks in their ratio of new home sales to GDP, they still remain well below 10%, she said.
Amid the post-war building boom of the 1950s, the U.S. ratio was just 5.9%, while it peaked again in 2005 at 3.1% amid the loose credit environment before the financial crisis. Even for Hong Kong , a city with limited land resources where property is considered a way to store wealth,
the ratio peaked at 8%-9% between 1997 and 1998, just before the bubble burst, she added.
She predicts some tough times to come for developers in smaller cities, predicting that sales in third-tier cities will see sales shrink by 60% between 2013 and 2020.
(bolds da minha autoria)
