China property tightening effective: Vanke

Beijing’s measures to cool “ridiculous” property prices have made some progress, but the risks of a bubble mean the tightening campaign is unlikely to ease up in the year ahead, the chairman of China’s largest property developer said.

Skyrocketing property prices in China’s top cities have stocked public discontent, prompting the government to step in. Measures introduced since April have made it more difficult for speculators and developers to hoard land and chase up prices, while lending has also been restricted.

“Tightening measures will not loosen next year,” China Vanke Chairman Wang Shi told the Reuters China Investment Summit Thursday.

“If we can control the pace of property price gains within a reasonable range, it’s already an achievement.”

Wang, a former chicken feed trader who has twice scaled Mount Everest, projected Vanke’s property sales will grow at a slower rate in 2011 after growing more than 80 percent in 2010 to a record 100 billion yuan ($15 billion).

Sales will at least grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20 percent to 200 billion yuan ($30 billion) by 2014, said Wang, who founded the company in the 1980s in China’s manufacturing boom town of Shenzhen.

China risked a Japanese-style real estate bubble if the government doesn’t control what Wang described as ridiculous property price moves in its top-tier cities.- Global Times