this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Even China's population of 1.4 billion would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments littered across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public critique of the country's crisis-hit property market.

China's property sector, once the pillar of the economy, has slumped since 2021 when real estate giant China Evergrande Group (3333.HK) defaulted on its debt obligations following a clampdown on new borrowing.

Big-name developers such as Country Garden Holdings (2007.HK) continue to teeter close to default even to this day, keeping home-buyer sentiment depressed.

As of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) show.

That would be equal to 7.2 million homes, according to Reuters calculations, based on the average home size of 90 square metres.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

Nah. China's urbanization rate is currently 65%. South Korea for comparison has 82% urbanization rate. So the Chinese have plenty more (say, a hundred million or so more) homes to build. The current difficulties are more to do with (i) loss of consumer confidence caused by the leadership's bad economic management, and (ii) the deliberate restriction of credit to developers because of the government's concerns about debt.

This analysis reminds me of the hoo-hah about China's "ghost cities" circa 2010. Those ghost cities ended up being filled up.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (8 children)

There are still vast ghost cities in that country, so no they don't actually all fill up

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sooo many empty or partially used shopping malls

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Haha both!

I dunno which is worse. The ones in China were never used, just built and left to rot. Many in the US had some decades of glory, then ended up with the same fate.

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