April 8 (Bloomberg) -- China’s housing prices will be stagnant through 2010 as government efforts to spur purchases through economic stimulus measures and lower interest rates fail to cut into a glut of homes, said E-House (China) Holdings Ltd, a Shanghai-based real estate broker and consultant.
“Prices won’t rise until inventory is cleared,” E-House Chief Financial Officer Li-Lan Cheng said in an interview in New York. “I don’t see such a scenario until sometime in 2010.”
China’s economy, the world’s third largest, faces its biggest threat from the real estate sector, Fan Jianping, head of the State Information Center’s economic forecasting department, said March 18. Home prices fell for a third straight month in February, dropping a record 1.2 percent, the National Development and Reform Commission said March 10.
Housing prices in China’s top 20 cities probably declined 5 percent in March, Cheng said. He said oversupply was the worst in Beijing and Shanghai while the southern cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen were “bottoming out.”
