Chinese real estate developers, including the highly indebted Evergrande, have run a business that relied on selling apartments before they were completed. Pictured here is an Evergrande development in Beijing on January 6, 2022.
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BEIJING – China’s real estate market desperately needs a boost in confidence, analysts said, after reports of homebuyers stopping mortgage payments shook bank shares and raised concerns about a systemic crisis.
The size of mortgages is not as worrying as the impact of recent events on demand and prices for one of China’s largest financial assets: housing.
“It is crucial for decision makers to restore market confidence quickly and to break a potentially negative feedback loop,” Goldman Sachs China chief economist Hui Shan and a team said in a report Sunday.
Last week, an increase in the reported number of home buyers who stopped paying their mortgages prompted many Chinese banks to announce their low exposure to such loans. But bank shares fell. Homebuyers protested against construction delays for the apartments they had paid for before they were completed, as is typical in China.
“If left alone, more homebuyers could stop paying off mortgages, and [further] strain real estate developers’ cash flows, which in turn could lead to more construction delays and project freezes,” the Goldman report said.
Uncertainty “dampens households’ desire to buy homes from those developers who undoubtedly need sales the most,” analysts said.
After two decades of tremendous growth, China’s real estate developers have found it more difficult to stay afloat during Beijing’s intervention against companies’ high dependence on debt for growth. Highly indebted developers such as Evergrande Group defaulted late last year.
Developers’ persistent financial problems coupled with Covid restrictions have delayed construction projects, forcing homebuyers to jeopardize their own financial credit by suspending mortgage payments.
The number of real estate projects involved more than tripled in just a few days to more than 100 as of July 13, according to Jefferies.
That is a tiny 1% of the total mortgage balance in China, analysts said.
Across banks covered by Goldman Sachs, the average exposure to real estate including mortgages was only 17%, the firm’s financial analysts wrote in a report last week.
“We see this mortgage risk as more about households’ willingness, rather than ability, to pay off mortgages,” the report said, “as developers have delayed the construction of properties given the difficulty of refinancing.”
But if more homebuyers refuse to pay their mortgages, the bad feeling will reduce demand – and theoretically prices – in a vicious circle.
Calls have been requested to increase trust.
“In the second half of 2022, there is no hope of a rapid recovery in the real estate sector, and it will continue to pull economic growth,” said Gary Ng, senior economist at Natixis CIB Asia Pacific. “The antidote is to increase confidence in home buyers and developers again, but it has proved to be a difficult task.”
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Stopping mortgage payments is an extreme move that should not become a common practice, especially since there are legal processes to deal with delays in completing apartments, said Qin Gang, deputy director of China’s real estate research institute ICR.
He cited talks with industry leaders and said that reports of suspended payments are very unfavorable for maintaining the real estate sector’s recovery. To see also : 3 tap breaking in selected real estate.
Normally, if developers fail to deliver apartments within the agreed period, home buyers can apply to terminate their purchase contracts, Goldman Sachs real estate analysts said in a report last week.
Analysts said that approval usually takes three months, and that the developer must return the down payment and completed mortgage payments to the home buyer, including interest. The rest of the mortgage should go to the banks, the report states.
A six-year low in house purchase plans
Demand for new homes has already fallen. See the article : Real estate companies are not licensing staff right and left.
A quarterly survey by the People’s Bank of China found in June that only 16.9% of residents plan to buy a home within the next three months, the lowest since 16.3% in the third quarter of 2016.
Earlier this year, the central bank took a significant step towards increasing the real estate market by lowering mortgage rates. Many cities have relaxed guidelines in recent months to support home purchases.
But since April, property sales have fallen 25% or more from last year’s levels, according to data from Wind Information.
The average price of over 100 Chinese cities has barely risen in the past year, although prices in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai have risen by double digits, reflecting different demand, according to Wind Information.
Calls to complete and deliver apartments
Any policy that can ensure home delivery will be useful, said Bruce Pang, chief economist and head of research, Greater China, JLL. See the article : Let’s talk about business: Parkview wins awards for quality success. He said that the banks have limited exposure to unfinished construction projects and have the opportunity to restore confidence in the market.
Dai Xianglong, former head of the People’s Bank of China, said on Saturday that China would not experience anything like the “subprime lending crisis” in 2007 in the United States, and proposed measures to boost confidence in the real estate industry and stabilize house prices. That is according to a state media report.
But even the state-sponsored Securities Times last week raised the specter of systemic financial risk in an article urging local governments and developers to deliver houses on time.
“Mortgage lending is minimal and the affected balances at most Chinese national banks are currently low,” said Harry Hu, senior director of S&P Global Ratings, in a statement.
“But the downside pressure can build if the recent suspension of mortgage repayments from certain populations in China is not handled well and manifests itself in systemic risk,” Hu said.
On Sunday, the official newspaper of China’s banking and insurance regulator published similar admonitions and pressured to support the delivery of apartments and financing for the real estate industry.
Without the real estate sector’s move, China’s GDP could have grown by 3% in the second quarter against 0.4% growth reported on Friday, according to Goldman Sachs’ analysis.
