Growth of home prices slows in Nov

Louis Bai, CEO of the Beijing office of Barratt Homes - one of the largest property developers in the United Kingdom - said that members of China's emerging middle class, not millionaires, have been the major buyers of the company's projects in London.

"Most of our individual buyers' family annual incomes hover around 500,000 yuan. Around 60 percent of them are pure financial investors while 40 percent are thinking about immigration and their children's education," said Bai.

Diversifying their investment portfolios, Bai said, is one of their major motivations to buy overseas properties. Barratt Homes plans to sell 200 units to Chinese buyers in the first half of 2014.

According to Bai, Chinese companies will also have to fine-tune their strategies to deal with more uncertainty in the market.

For instance, PKU Resources Group, a property developer partly owned by the Founder Group, is working on a platform to integrate educational, healthcare, financial and shopping services for its residents.

Yu Li, president of PKU Resources, said that customers not only want an apartment but also better services, and that the company will make a concerted effort to integrate the resources of Peking University and of the Founder Group to better serve its clients.

Meanwhile, Franshion Properties (China) Ltd, a subsidiary of Sinochem Group, made "green" buildings its key strategy.

The company has just signed a deal with Beijing Green Carbon Energy-conservation Technology Services Co Ltd to sell the latter 1,000 metric tons of carbon emission quotas each year.

The move marked the first carbon trading deal in China's construction sector, and the two companies will develop more cooperation projects in the environmental sector.

Franshion's carbon emission quota mainly comes from the company's energy-saving building renovation projects.