No end to home buyers' heartache
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On the first day of 2011, Nancy Ling, a senior marketing and communications manager at a Fortune 500 company operating in China, made the same New Year's resolution as last year. She would buy a small apartment in, she hoped, not too rural an area of Shanghai.
Ling, 30, admitted that -reaching her goal had brought its share of frustrations in 2010. While she managed to increase her savings to 200,000 yuan (US$30,700), the dream of buying an apartment of her own seemed to slip further from her grasp.
"I've just managed to secure a moderate pay increase in my new job," she said. "But I really have no idea whether that's going to help. Looking back, I feel quite bad that I perhaps made the wrong choice and decided to wait and see what would happen after the government began cracking down on rising property prices in mid-April."
In fact, Ling's regret is probably now reverberating through the masses of wannabe homeowners who had pinned their hopes on decreasing home prices after the government began tightening credit and loan criteria some eight months ago.
Continuing rise
Despite two rounds of housing-related tightening measures since mid-April and two interest rate increases since October, housing prices have continued to rise as property buyers show no sensitivity to more expensive money.
The price of a new home in Shanghai, excluding those built for relocated residents under urban redevelopment plans, averaged about 21,699 yuan a square meter for 2010, according to Shanghai Uwin Real Estate Information Services Co.
That's up about 34 percent from 2009.
The city's existing home market, meanwhile, has been operating under a similar scenario. Prices keep rising, dashing the hopes of would-be homeowners still clinging to dreams of owning their own place. Century 21 China Real Estate, the city's second-largest real estate chain, said prices rose between 14 and 19 percent in Shanghai last year.
Houses larger than 140 square meters jumped the most, with prices up almost 19 percent. Units below that floor space were up about 14 percent, according to Century 21's tracking of 16 major residential developments in different areas across the city.
Shanghai is not alone in this. Across the nation, the property market is defying government attempts to rein it in.
Urban property prices in China in November climbed for the 18th consecutive month, up 7.7 percent from a year earlier.
"The country's property market bubble has shown stubborn resistance to accelerating government attempts to prick it," said Song Huiyong, research director with Shanghai Centaline Property Consultants Ltd, operator of the city's largest real estate chain.
"That has shaken public confidence about the effectiveness of government policies. A rebound in the market is more likely as more people decide to stop waiting and enter the market before prices rise even further."
Centaline's research indicates the market has grown even more resilient in the past eight months.
Just two weeks after the first round of tightening measures were -announced in April, daily -transaction volume of existing houses plunged to below 200 units in Shanghai from former levels as high as 1,000.
Two months later, sales rose to between 600 and 650 units a day, according to its study.
Since then, the market had managed to bounce back with even greater speed.
More than four weeks after the second round of tightening -policies was introduced in September, daily transaction volume of existing homes hit a periodic bottom of less than 250 units in Shanghai and then rebounded to 450 units in just three weeks.
It soon advanced further to around 550 and 600 units.
It is unknown what the government plans to do in 2011, but there's been no sign of policy makers -backing down.
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