Even China’s 1.4 billion people wouldn’t be able to fill all the vacant flats strewn around the nation, a former official claimed on Saturday in a rare instance of public criticism of the crisis-hit real estate sector in the nation.
The once-important Chinese real estate market has been in free fall since the year 2021, when China Evergrande Group, a massive developer, stopped paying its debts as a result of restrictions on new borrowing.
Even now, well-known developers like Country Garden Holdings remain perilously near to going bankrupt, which keeps buyers’ confidence low.
According to the most recent data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the aggregate floor area of unsold residences as of the end of August was 648 million square meters (7 billion square feet).
Using an average home size of 90 square meters, that can be equivalent to 7.2 million residences.
The majority of empty space according to experts, is made up of vacant properties that were bought by speculators during the previous market upturn in 2016 and numerous residential projects that have previously been sold but have not yet been finished due to cash flow issues.
How many empty homes are there currently? The most extreme expert claims there are already enough empty dwellings to house 3 billion people, according to each expert’s estimate, according to He Keng, 81, a former deputy director of the statistics department.
He stated at a symposium in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan according to a video provided by the government-run China News Service,
“That estimate might be a bit too much, but 1.4 billion people probably can’t fill them.”
In a public forum, he expressed a poor opinion of the economically significant sector, which is in stark contrast to the official claim that the Chinese economy is “resilient.”
A foreign ministry official recently stated at a news conference that while there have been numerous predictions of the collapse of the Chinese economy, what has actually collapsed is such hyperbole, not the Chinese economy.
