Guangdong, Jiangsu lead in national property investment

Total real estate investment of China's 31 provinces, cities and autonomous regions has reached 11 trillion yuan ($1.6 trillion) in the first 11 months of the year, surpassing whole year's investment of 2017, data from National Bureau of Statistics showed, reported financial news provider Economic View app.

Investments in Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces have taken the lead among the whole country by breaking through the 1 trillion yuan threshold. Zhejiang province ranked the third with an investment of 927.1 billion yuan.

Besides the total investment amount, year-on-year growth of real estate investment in certain regions was also outstanding, with the Tibet autonomous region witnessing a 136 percent increase, topping the whole country. Twenty-four out of the 31 regions saw yearly growth in property investment, with 14 of them increasing over 10 percent.

Xie Yifeng, director of China Urban Real Estate Research Institute, said the acceleration of shanty towns' renovation and infrastructure construction in Tibet have attributed to the region's property investment.

Ningxia Hui autonomous region saw the largest dip of 30.7 percent in property investment, with Qinghai and Hainan province both slumping 10 percent. Local destocking policies in certain regions have slowed down the investment in real restates, said Yan Yuejin, chief research officer of E-house China R&D Institute.

South China's Hainan province, which boasts of tourism and recreation activities, has seen large slump in property investment in the first three quarters, as the province has implemented strict house purchasing restrictions to ban housing speculation.

According to data of the Hainan Statistics Bureau, Hainan sold 13.1 million square meters of commercial residential buildings during the Jan-Nov period, down 36.5 percent on a yearly basis. Sales revenue fell 21.2 percent to 190.5 billion yuan. New construction houses area in Hainan totaled 17.87 million square meters, a drop of 7.1 percent.

Zhang Dawei, chief analyst of Centaline Property, said the property investment will stay flat in 2019, as the just closed Central Economic Work Conference called for a long-term mechanism to maintain the sound development of the real estate market and adhering to the principle that "housing is for living in, not speculation."

"Real estate investment growth in 2019, if any, will not be more than 0.5 percent," said Yan Yuejin, another analyst.