China’s ponzi-like property market is eroding faith in the state
Its meltdown could scarcely come at a worse time for Xi Jinping
The 120km train ride between the cities of Luoyang and Zhengzhou is a showcase of economic malaise and broken dreams. From the window endless, half-built residential towers pass one after another for the duration of the hour-long journey. Many of the buildings appear near completion; some are finished and have become homes to families. But many more are empty skeletons where construction ceased long ago. Developers have run out of cash and can no longer pay workers and buy materials. Projects have stalled. Families will never get their homes.
The train ride through China’s heartland helps to explain one of the country’s biggest crises in recent memory: the public’s loss of confidence in the government’s economic model. For decades the property industry has been symbolic of China’s unstoppable rise. Private entrepreneurs have made vast fortunes. Average people have witnessed their net worth soar as home values trebled. Local governments have filled their coffers by selling vast tracts of land to developers. An astonishing 70% of Chinese household wealth is now tied up in real estate.
To undermine trust in this model is to shake the foundations of China’s growth miracle. With sweeping covid-19 lockdowns and a crackdown on private entrepreneurs, this is happening on many fronts. But nowhere is it clearer than in the property industry, which makes up an estimated 25% of gdp. New project starts fell by 45% in July compared with a year ago, home sales by 33% and property investment by 12%. The effects are rippling through the economy, hitting furniture-makers and steelworkers alike. The blow to confidence comes at a critical time for Xi Jinping, China’s leader, who will probably be granted a third term at a party congress in October.
Reviving trust in the system is crucial for Mr Xi and the Communist Party. Yet the response from the government has been uncharacteristically disjointed and slow, with officials seemingly overawed by the complexity of the situation. To restore faith in the housing market, the public needs to see stalled projects completed and prices rise. Meanwhile, construction firms and their workers need to be reimbursed, and local and foreign investors to be paid back on their fixed-income products. And all this must be done without reinflating the unsustainable debt bubble that the property market has become.
Lines in the sand
The housing crisis has two immediate causes. The first is a government crackdown on the excesses of the property industry. Since August 2020 officials have restricted developers’ ratios of liabilities to assets, net debt to equity and cash to short-term debt, in a policy known as the “three red lines”. This has forced many to stop unsustainable borrowing and sell down assets, severely limiting their ability to continue building and selling new projects.
China’s zero-covid policy is a second blow. The central government has forced dozens of cities to lock residents in their homes for days, and sometimes weeks, on end when covid cases are discovered. At the time of writing, the megacities of Chengdu and Shenzhen are fully or partly locked down. The shutdowns have stopped people from viewing homes and making purchases. They have also had an impact on the consumer psyche. Entrepreneurs fear the sudden closure of their businesses. Employees worry about being laid off. This sort of trepidation does not encourage homebuying.
The result is a crunch. China’s developers are highly reliant on selling homes long before they are built, so as to generate liquidity. Last year they pre-sold 90% of homes. But without access to bonds and loans, as banks reduce their exposure to the property sector, and with new sales now falling, the Ponzi-like nature of the property market has come into full view.
Evergrande, the world’s most indebted developer, defaulted in December. An effort to restructure its offshore debts, intended as a model to follow, missed an end-of-July deadline. At least 28 other property companies have missed payments to investors or gone into restructuring. Trading in the shares of 30 Hong Kong-listed developers, constituting 10% of the market by sales, has been frozen, according to Gavekal, a research firm. In early August half of China’s listed developers traded at a price-to-earnings ratio of less than 0.5, the level that Evergrande traded at four months before it defaulted, notes Song Houze of MacroPolo, a think-tank in Chicago.
Firms that just months ago were considered safe bets are now struggling. Take Country Garden, China’s biggest developer by sales. Earlier this year most analysts shrugged off concerns that it would come under pressure. Investors continued to buy its bonds. But on August 30th Country Garden revealed that profits for the first half of the year had fallen by almost 100%. The property market has “slid rapidly into severe depression”, it noted in its earnings. The strain on Country Garden indicates that problems are no longer specific to certain developers. The entire industry is at risk.
Potential homebuyers have dropped out of the market. Far more worrying, though, are the millions of people waiting, often for years, for homes for which they have already paid. Just 60% of homes that were pre-sold between 2013 and 2020 have been delivered.
Mr Liu, who has asked to be referred to by his family name, purchased a flat in Zhengzhou in 2014, making an initial 250,000 yuan ($40,000) down-payment. The home was scheduled for completion in 2017. But that day never came. Instead, he rented a flat, before eventually buying another one in an old building without an elevator. It is hardly the life he imagined for himself. Mr Liu never started paying his mortgage and has engaged in endless discussions with the property developer on getting back his down-payment. “There’s no use,” he says.
Analysts have been aware of these problems for years, but had believed that the Chinese authorities would not allow aggrieved homebuyers to protest. A report published two years ago by pwc, an accounting firm, noted that even when construction on housing projects stalls, “the hundreds or thousands of uncoordinated households normally have little ability to influence things”.
This calculation has been turned on its head. A small but influential movement to collect and publish data on the refusal to pay mortgages has taken the authorities by surprise. On July 12th anonymous volunteers began sharing data on mortgage boycotts on social media. So far about 350 have been identified; analysts believe this is probably a fraction of the true number. State censors have done their best to remove references to the explosive information, but knowledge of the protests appears to have spread nevertheless. As it does, others will be persuaded to delay purchases or halt mortgage payments.
Investors and potential homebuyers are now watching with unease as the state pieces together its response, at both central and local levels. For more than a decade Chinese cities have wielded a long list of rules and incentives to fine-tune local real-estate markets, usually to reduce speculation and cool rapid price rises. These included control over access to mortgages, as well as limits on who can buy homes and how many they can buy.
Cities are now loosening these rules. Between May and July municipal governments announced 304 individual measures to restore confidence, according to cicc, a Chinese investment bank. Zhengzhou, at the centre of the mortgage protests, was an early mover. In March it announced 18 actions in the hopes of stimulating demand. These included measures to make it easier to get mortgages, and to allow families with elderly members to buy flats if they move to the city.
These signals to buyers have attracted lots of attention—not because they have revived demand but because they seem to contradict central-government policy. In a video widely circulated on Chinese social media in August, a local Communist Party chief in Hunan province was seen calling on people to buy as many homes as possible: “Did you buy a third one? Then buy a fourth.” The message clashes with the one from Mr Xi himself, who has warned that “homes are for living in” and certainly not for speculative investment.
Local governments have also been encouraged by regulators and officials to create bail-out funds to invest in unfinished housing projects, and eventually to help deliver homes to frustrated buyers. Zhengzhou has allocated 80bn yuan ($12bn) to the cause. The thinking goes that local funds will be better suited to conditions on the ground.
Zhengzhou is experimenting with perhaps the most aggressive local plan yet. The city government has issued a directive to developers that says all stalled construction must restart by October 6th. Insolvent companies that cannot do so must file for restructuring in order to bring in new investment, and also repay any down-payments made by homebuyers such as Mr Liu. Failure to do so could result in developers being investigated for embezzlement and other serious crimes.
For their part, policymakers have repeatedly cut mortgage rates since mid-May. To guarantee the supply of homes, the central government has taken to fully guaranteeing new bond issuance by some private developers, effectively shifting the risk to the state. Longfor, a struggling property firm, priced a 1.5bn-yuan bond at a 3.3% coupon rate on August 26th, far below market pricing. This was possible solely because the bond was fully underwritten by China Bond Insurance, a state agency. More such issuance is planned in order to deliver liquidity to developers the government views as higher quality. It is the beginning of a programme to pick winners.
Another prong of state support is coming in the form of direct liquidity. On August 22nd the central bank and finance ministry said that they will back special loans from state-directed policy banks that can be provided to complete pre-sold homes. The size of the programme has not been disclosed, but Bloomberg, a news service, reported that 200bn yuan would be made available.
This sort of public spending is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it will help deliver homes to rightful owners and restart mortgage payments, taking pressure off banks. But at the same time the cash is filling a hole created by bad local governance and dubious property developers. “That simply represents money that can’t be spent on stimulus elsewhere,” notes Alex Wolf of JPMorgan Chase, a bank.
Back to the drawing board
Zhengzhou’s efforts to encourage new buyers since March have fallen flat. Instead, conditions have continued to deteriorate, suggesting that tinkering with local policies is not enough. Local bail-out funds also look flimsy. On paper several cities have hefty pots to spend, but they rely on local government financing firms that are themselves strapped for cash. Analysts are closely watching Zhengzhou’s attempt to restart all construction within a month, but many question if the funds needed for such a quick fix are available. The measures could unleash a wave of collapses among smaller developers, causing panic and financial turmoil.
Investors have put more hope in the central government, but so far its response has failed to match the scale of the crisis. The 200bn-yuan lending programme may account for just 10% of what is needed to complete all the country’s unfinished homes. About $5trn-worth of residential property has been pre-sold since 2020, reckons Mr Song of MacroPolo, making a bail-out of even a small portion of those homes incredibly costly.
The central government still has more levers to pull. Larry Hu of Macquarie, an investment bank, says a number of measures can be snapped into place. These include temporarily easing the “three red lines”’ policy, or vowing to act as a lender of last resort for all stalled housing projects. The latter, while expensive, is fully within the central government’s financial wherewithal.
The debate now focuses not on whether the central government can restore confidence, but on how far it is willing to go. The original crackdown on leverage was meant to punish companies that had taken on too much debt. A bigger bail-out will encourage more developers to ask for assistance in completing homes, pushing the government to subsidise yet more of the property sector, writes Allen Feng of Rhodium, a research firm: “quite the opposite of what was intended with the ‘three red lines’”.
The campaign against leverage was also meant to bring the property sector more in line with demand over the next decade. Officials have long acknowledged that developers were selling far too many homes. About 70% of those sold since 2018 were purchased by people who already owned one, estimates JPMorgan. Restricting debt levels was supposed to force firms to adjust to actual demand.
That demand is likely to fall as China’s population growth slows. Home sales reached 1.57bn square metres in 2021, more than twice as high as in 2007. But Chen Long of Plenum, another research firm, projects that real annual demand will fall to 0.88bn-1.36bn square metres over the next decade, as the demographic shift takes hold and urbanisation slows. Reinflating the market means propping up the bubble.
The government’s balancing act is fraught with risk. In mid-October the party congress will take place as major cities lock down. Mortgage boycotts will rumble on, and possibly grow larger still. Overall confidence in China’s economic foundations could cross a threshold beyond which it becomes far more difficult to recover. All this means that Mr Xi’s third term will start in inauspicious circumstances.