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

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.

  • PelicanenEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    and there is less crime

    I wouldn’t necessarily bet on this, authoritarian states are breeding grounds for corruption and that in turn fuels crime. I wouldn’t be surprised if China has a problem with criminality that the government, at least on a local level, not only turns a blind eye to but is complicit in.