HISTORY & READINGS at Brian Ripley's Canadian Housing Price Charts & Plunge-O-Meter

When the tree falls the monkeys scatter

4/18/2014

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shù dǎo hú sūn

The chart mashup shows China's national real estate development and sales decisively rolling over in 2013 which has in part led to Chinese import data plunging into April 2014. (Charts via Soberlook.com and NBS China)

Gordon G. Chang, a Forbes contributor has been cataloging the drama throughout March and April 2014 (selected quotes):

Walmart will be closing marginal locations, about 9% of total in China.

Hangzhou’s Grade A office buildings at the end of 2013 had average occupancy rate of 30%.

Hangzhou (fourth-largest metropolitan area of 2.5+ million people) faces “burgeoning swaths of empty apartment units.”

“It seems that the 30% price cut in Hangzhou (residential prices) has really changed the way Chinese people (nationally) think about real estate".

The real estate market in Hangzhou looks like it has just passed an inflection point... people’s mentality has changed.

Now, the problem of no buyers is spreading across the country... China’s residential markets are becoming inelastic. People aren’t buying because they believe prices will decline further.

Rich Chinese, now interested in foreign holdings, are also shunning their home market. Middle class Chinese are also largely out of the market.

Many private developers had gambled that property prices would rise faster than interest rates, but that now looks like a losing bet.

China is at the point where problems are feeding on themselves. Pessimism about property, which accounts for about 15% of China’s gross domestic product, is beginning to affect the broader economy. “Without question, everyone thinks there is a bubble.”

“The banking system and the shadow banking system are becoming concerned about exposure... and refuse to provide credit to developers... forcing them to cut prices. If this persists, it will turn into a vicious loop.”

When the tree falls, the monkeys scatter.
And now a selected Chinese environmental report:

The extent of China's soil pollution, long guarded as a state secret, was laid out in an official report that confirmed deep-seated fears about contaminated farmland and the viability of the country's food supply. Nearly one-fifth of the country's arable land is polluted, officials said in the report, shedding unexpected light on the scale of the problem—a legacy of China's three decades of breakneck economic growth and industrial expansion.

In April 2013, the discovery of unusually high quantities of cadmium in batches of rice grown in Hunan—the country's top rice-producing region, as well as a top-five producer of nonferrous metals like copper and lead—set off worries about farmland and sent prices for Hunan rice tumbling by as much as 14%. Continue Reading at the Wall Street Journal.