Property tax trials yielding meager results, say analysts

Analysts said apparently, the property tax has a very limited effect on local property markets, although it is hard to gauge this exactly given other market changes and policies that have been imposed in the meantime.

The limited impact of property tax is attributed to many factors, such as the small number of apartments that fall into the taxable range and low rates compared with stubbornly high home prices, said Joe Zhou, head of research for Jones Lang LaSalle East China.

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"The key lessons from the trials in Shanghai and Chongqing are likely to be on the administrative side. How does one calculate the tax? How does one charge the tax? How does one collect the tax? Also, it is important to decide how to enforce the payment of tax," said James Macdonald, head of Savills Research China.

Chen Jie, a real estate research professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, agreed, adding that more time and wider discussion on the property tax are needed before expanding it nationwide.

"The central government promotes the property tax in its drive to offset the shortage in local government's revenue, strike a balance between rich and low-income families, and tame soaring home prices, but the reality is more complex," Chen said.

There are at least 8 million residential apartments in Shanghai, but only about 70,000 homes are subject to taxation, meaning less than 1 percent of the homes are actually being taxed, according to Chen.

In comparison, the city posted about 100 billion yuan in land sales revenue annually between 2009 and 2013, so property tax cannot replace the pivotal role of land sales at the moment, added Chen.

It's worth noting that the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China decided to expand the establishment of a property tax law and to promote tax reform when the time is right.

Like any reform, property tax reform will be a long-term project, and every decision made about it should be both prudent and progressive to avoid any market turbulence, Hu Zhigang, deputy head of China Real Estate and Housing Research Association was quoted as saying by Xinhua News Agency.

Imposing a new tax nationwide requires a legislative process - and this cannot be completed in a short time. Meanwhile, how one unifies the many and deeply divergent opinions about property tax will also need time, said Hu.