The Chinese Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR) is seeking to
improve land reserve system amid intense concerns over a 9.5
percent year-on-year housing price rise in 70 major Chinese cities
this October.
Experts hold that robust demand, tight supply and higher land
development costs drove up housing prices and the government's new
move is in a bid to regulate the real estate market and curb the
housing price rises.
The local land and resources regulatory agencies will conduct
the macro-control of land development, storage and supply,
according to the circular issued jointly by the MLR, the Ministry
of Finance and the People's Bank of China, China's central bank
towards the end of last month.
The large-scale land hoarding of some real estate development
enterprises has recently become the focus of the media.
Experts hold that this is one move taken by the government to
prevent property developers from hoarding land and guarantee land
use for basic infrastructure and residential construction for the
needy.
According to a research report released by the prestigious
Beijing Normal University on November 20, more than 800 million
square meters of land has been hoarded by property developers
during the past decade.
Land hoarding is especially common in the country's eastern
provinces of Shangdong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang and southwestern
province of Sichuan, says the report.
In a similar development, earlier last month the Chinese
government urged local governments to reserve at least 70 percent
of the land designated for residential construction for low-rent
units or smaller, cheaper commercial homes.
The government has been trying to curb soaring real estate
prices and provide adequate housing for the needy. Regulators have
raised interest rates, ordered developers to build more small,
low-cost homes and imposed curbs on the purchase of second homes
and foreign investment in real estate.
In a bid to provide low-cost homes, the Ministry of Construction
(MOC) and the MLR and another seven relevant ministries released
the low-rent housing guarantee policy this November, which took
effect on December 1.
This policy is targeted at the country's ten million low-income
urban families whose living space is less than ten square meters
per person, accounting for 5.5 percent of the country's combined
households.
The low-rent housing guarantee policy is built on the back of
the low-rent housing system. By the end of October, the low-rent
housing system had been established in nearly all the 656 cities in
this country and 7.94 billion yuan (1.07 billion U.S. dollars) has
been earmarked this year to fund the system nationwide, surpassing
the total volume the country has pooled into this endeavor since it
started the low-rent housing project in 2003, according to
statistics from the MOC.
(Xinhua News Agency December 6, 2007)