Recently, China issued a set of new regulations concerning the property market in an effort to control the soaring housing prices. These regulations, however, will not stop foreign investors from buying properties in the mainland. On the contrary, more foreign capital has kept flowing into China's real estate market over the past two months. Analysts say that since China will soon issue some new regulations to constrain foreign capital from entering into domestic real estate market, foreign investors will take this last chance to store up land properties before the new regulations are enacted.

 

In last May, the Kaide Zhidi Real Estate Co., Ltd., a Singaporean company, and the Chengdu Zhixin Industrial Group worked together to set up a joint venture. The Singaporean company invested 1.09 billion yuan buying 50% of the shares in the new company. On June 13, Morgan Stanley spent 800 million yuan buying 116 luxury apartments in Shanghai. On July 13, the Standard Chartered Bank announced that it had invested HK$370 million in the Green City (China) Co., Ltd.

 

Meanwhile, investing activities from Hong Kong are active as well. The No.1 Shanghai Investing Company announced that they had put in 85 million yuan to buy the Zhongshan Cailian Zhiye Company. By this single deal, the No.1 Shanghai Investing Company had obtained the land use right to 100,000 square meters of land and the construction of a project named "Sheng Xian Zhuang." It had also obtained the land use right to 8,000 square meters of land for road construction.

 

While big foreign financing institutions increase their investment in domestic property market, many other overseas institutions will follow suit lately.

 

Director of the Research Department of the Shanghai Fuyang Property Management Consulting Firm Hu Xin said that the new regulations published not long ago had raised the threshold of real estate investment. Many domestic property developers therefore have encountered some problems in their cash flow. Foreign real estate developers, however, do not have problems in this aspect. So they have taken the chance to buy a slew of properties in China.

 

(Chinanews.cn July 19, 2006)