BEIJING (Reuters) – Not even China’s 1.4 billion people would be enough to fill all the empty apartments across the country, a former official said on Saturday, in a rare public criticism of the country’s hard-hit property market. for a crisis.
The Chinese real estate sector, once a pillar of the economy, has collapsed since 2021, when real estate giant China Evergrande Group defaulted on its debt obligations following a restriction on new loans.
Big-name developers like Country Garden Holdings remain on the brink of default, keeping homebuyer morale depressed.
At the end of August, the total area of unsold homes amounted to 648 million square meters (7 billion square feet), according to the latest data from the National Statistics Office (ONE).
This would be equivalent to 7.2 million homes, according to Reuters calculations, based on an average size of 90 square meters.
That’s not counting the numerous residential projects that have already been sold but have not yet been completed due to liquidity problems, or the multiple homes bought by speculators in the last market rally in 2016 that remain empty, which together make up the bulk of the space not used, experts estimate.
“How many empty homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different figure, and the most extreme believes that the current number of empty homes is enough for 3 billion people,” explains He Keng, 81, former deputy director of the Bureau of Statistics.
“That estimate may be a bit exaggerated, but probably 1.4 billion people will not be able to fill them,” He declared at a forum held in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, according to a video broadcast by the official China News Service.
His negative view of the sector in a public forum contrasts sharply with the official narrative that the Chinese economy is “resilient.”
“From time to time there are all kinds of comments predicting the collapse of the Chinese economy, but what has collapsed is that rhetoric, not China’s economy,” a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said at a recent press conference. (Reporting by Albee Zhang and Ryan Woo; Editing in Spanish by Ricardo Figueroa)
Source: Ambito
