Immerhin ( zumindest heute....UPDATE: Zu früh gefreut... ) keine Meldungen über neue Ghost Towns .... ;-) Mehr zum immer ernster werdenden "China Syndrome" gibt es hier, hier , hier & hier.....
Sun Hung Kai sales yield $541 mln over weekend MW
Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd. (0016.HK) said Monday it sold 900 flats over the weekend at Yoho Midtown, a residential project in New Territories West, for HK$4.2 billion (US$541 million).
The company sold the units at the project in Yuen Long for an average of HK$5,400 per square foot, project director Amy Teo said.
About 40 units were immediately advertised for sale on the secondary market at a premium of up to 20%, the South China Morning Post newspaper reported Monday, citing property agents.
Yoho Midtown is Hong Kong's biggest housing project to go on sale so far this year. It has eight towers containing 1,890 units ranging in size from 400 to 1,400 square feet
China's building bubble about to burst The Star
Frenzied developers with access to cheap money are creating a glut of premium office space and luxury apartments, priced at about 80 times the average income of the city's residents.
Prospective middle-class homeowners, in panic-buying mode, are snapping up two properties at once, hoping to flip the second one to finance the first. Civic officials are encouraging the building boom.
The sale of vacant lots bolster their municipal coffersThe disturbing phenomenon extends beyond Beijing, where housing prices are far higher than in Dubai's overbuilt property market before that red-hot Persian Gulf economy imploded last year. In December alone, Chinese housing prices rose almost 8 per cent in 70 major Chinese cities, while housing starts leapt by 34 per cent nationwide.
China New Village Makes Chanos See Dubai 1,000 Times Bloomberg
The township of Huaxi in the Yangtze River Delta is a proud symbol of how Chinese communists embraced capitalism to lift 300 million people out of poverty during the past three decades.If the local government in Huaxi really start the "Babel Project" even the biggest "fan" must admit that Beijing has lost control over the provinces....
Its leaders took a farm community with bamboo huts and ox carts in the 1970s and transformed it into an industrial and commercial powerhouse where today many of its 30,000 residents live in mansions and most have a car. Per-capita income of 80,000 yuan ($11,700) -- almost four times the national average -- allows Huaxi to claim it’s China’s richest village.
Huaxi is also emblematic of the country’s construction and real estate boom. Communist Party officials there are building one of the world’s 30 tallest buildings, a 2.5 billion yuan, 328-meter (1,076-foot) tower(Photo Tower ). The revolving restaurant atop the so-called New Village in the Sky offers sweeping views of paddy fields, fish ponds and orchards, Bloomberg Markets reports in its April issue.
Huaxi has an even more ambitious project coming up: a 6 billion yuan, 538-meter skyscraper that would today rank as the world’s second tallest. The only loftier building is the new Burj Khalifa in Dubai.
Sollte der "Tumbau zu Babel" von der lokalen Regierung tatsächlich vorangetrieben werden muß wohl auch der letzte "Bewunderer" eingestehen das Peking schon längere Zeit die Kontrolle über die Provinzfürsten verloren hat.....
UPDATE:
China regulators halt credit to local-government funds MW
China's banking regulator has ordered lenders to stop granting loans to investment vehicles backed by local governments, the latest move to tighten credit standards amid mounting concerns of bad loans down the road, according to a state-media report Wednesday.
Banks have also been ordered to review existing loans used to finance projects backed by local governments, the report said.
When reading the next number it is important to note that France, Germany & UK have a combined population of 200 mio vs 46 Mio in Spain......
However, the Bank of England did not accept mortgage-backed debt as collateral in similar lending operations until after the run on Northern Rock.
How important is and has the real estate market been for the Euroland economy in the last years? Are there signs of weakness yet in the housing market? And, finally, what impact can we expect on consumption and the overall economy, credit growth and European Central Bank (ECB) policy? These are the questions we will address in this piece.
In fact, the housing boom in Spain presents some similarities with the post-unification era in Germany, as well as with the most recent developments in the U.S. The share of the construction sector in the Spanish GDP is now higher than it was in Germany at the end of the post-unification real estate boom and much higher than it was at the peak of the U.S. housing cycle in 2005. The impact is less pronounced in other countries.
The wealth effect is particularly evident in Chart 4. When we look at 2003 consumption growth in a large group of countries worldwide and regress the growth rate with the level of house price appreciation, we see a strong correlation. Germany and Japan, for example, had no price appreciation and no real consumption growth. On the other hand, Spain and France had strong price appreciation and stronger consumption. 
So far, we have seen in this installment of the European Perspectives that since the beginning of this century the share of residential investment has increased in Euroland, particularly in Spain, and that price appreciation in Euroland supported consumption, especially in Spain and France. What we haven’t considered yet is that the boom in housing resulted also in an acceleration of credit growth for home purchases (Chart 5).
We know the ingredients from the finance side that fueled credit growth and thus the housing markets in Europe: low interest rates in the European Monetary Union (EMU) (thanks to the convergence of the national bond curves down to the German yields), innovation in the mortgage markets (with the creation, for example, of new 50-year mortgages) and the exporting of the UK housing bubble into other European regions (through the surge in demand for holiday homes).
We would add that the real estate market tends to act on momentum with increasing prices boosting the demand for real estate as those who are planning a purchase tend to accelerate their decision and as increasing prices make a real estate investment look more attractive for the cohort of pro-cyclical minded investors. On the flip-side, housing slowdowns tend to take a long time to reverse, and this is why the current signs of weakness are particularly alarming.
In addition, anecdotal evidence suggests a decline in the number of transactions in countries like Spain and France, but unfortunately, there appears to be no hard data depicting these series (if anybody knows of such a data series, please let me know!).
While the central bank said ``there have been signs of recovery'' in money markets, the interest rate that banks charge each other for three-month loans hasn't returned to the level before credit costs surged on Aug. 9. The London interbank offered rate, which was 6.05 percent at the start of August, was 6.28 percent yesterday. It touched a nine-year high of 6.9 percent on Sept. 11.
The Bank of England, which had been criticized for not doing enough to help lenders after markets seized up, also said U.K. authorities need to ``strengthen their crisis management arrangements.'' Lawmakers will question Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling on the U.K. government's role in the affair at 11 a.m. in London today.
Debt Burden
Still, U.K. commercial banks' earnings and their capital reserves have helped them cope with the market rout, the bank said. ``Robust'' economic growth ``and the high profitability and capitalization of major U.K. banks provide a strong anchor for the financial system.''