Pudong boom fuels home sales

Shanghai’s new housing market continued picking up last week, with increases in both sales and supply.

The area of new residential properties sold, excluding government-funded affordable housing, rose 22.6 percent to about 143,000 square meters during the seven days to Sunday, Shanghai Centaline Property Consultants said Monday.

The Pudong New Area, where about 39,000 square meters of new housing was sold, a week-on-week surge of 85.7 percent, continued to outperform all other areas.

It was fueled by areas including Sanlin and Waigaoqiao which both boasted abundant supply. Nanhui followed most closely with weekly sales exceeding 20,000 square meters and Qingpu District came as the third with just over 10,000-square-meters’ transaction volume, according to Centaline.

“The rebound was good but still a little bit weak as it was about 25 percent lower than the weekly average volume registered over the past three months,” said Lu Wenxi, senior manager of research at Centaline.

“As more medium to high-end homes have been released to the market recently, which often take longer time to complete the deal, we don’t really expect any significant improvement at least over the next two weeks.”

The average cost of a new home fell to 58,224 yuan (US$8,400) per square meter, a weekly dip of 1.8 percent.

Four of the top 10 most sought-after projects cost more than 80,000 yuan per square meter, although none of them stayed above the 100,000-yuan-per-square-meter threshold.

A project in Pudong was the most popular, selling some 21,200 square meters, or 146 units, for an average of 54,153 yuan per square meter.

About 272,000 square meters of new homes in eight projects were released last week, 78.6 percent more than the previous week and the most in two months.