A Chinese official criticised the Chinese government for the crisis in the nation’s property sector. He Keng, the former deputy head of the statistics bureau, said that China’s entire population of 1.4 billion people will not be enough to fill the empty apartments littered across the nation.
News agency CNN in a report pointed out that it was an act of rare public critique of China’s real estate sector. China’s real estate sector was once considered to be one of the strongest pillars of its economy but it has slumped after big players like China Evergrande Group defaulted on its debt in 2021 which led to restrictions on fresh borrowing.
“How many vacant homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes is enough for 3 billion people,” Keng said.
Country Garden Holdings and Sunac are other major property developers who are precariously staring at a debt default. This has also hurt the home-buyer sentiment.
“That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can’t fill them,” Keng further added. He was speaking at a forum in the southern Chinese city Dongguan, according to a video released by the official media China News Service.
According to the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the combined floor area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet) as of August 2023.
News agency Reuters said that this is equal to 7.2 million homes, if 90 square metres (970 square feet) is considered as the average home size.
These statistics do not include numerous residential projects which have been sold but are not yet delivered or completed due to cash-flow problems. It also does not include homes purchased by speculators which are vacant
Keng’s view clashes with the message Beijing is conveying regarding the Chinese economy where it says that the economy is resilient. “All sorts of comments predicting the collapse of China’s economy keep surfacing every now and then, but what has collapsed is such rhetoric, not China’s economy,” the Chinese foreign ministry recently said.