In 2021, the growth rate of many indicators in the real estate market will slow down, and the agency predicts:
The average annual sales scale of the property market may return to the level five years ago
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, from January to November 2021, the sales area of domestic commercial housing was 1581.31 million square meters, an increase of 4.8% year-on-year, and the sales of commercial housing was 16,166.7 billion yuan, an increase of 8.5% year-on-year.
This year, the real estate market has undergone many turns and changes, and a wave of "first rise and then decline" has emerged.
Although the scale of market sales may still break the record, throughout 2021, many key indicators of the real estate market, including sales, development, and land acquisition, have shown a downward trend.
The current real estate market has entered an adjustment channel, the sales of real estate companies have slowed down, funds and liabilities are under pressure, and some real estate companies have already revealed their difficulties.
Some insiders pointed out that real estate companies have begun to change and adjust their business operation thinking, and they are pursuing more stable development.
The market size may still hit a new high
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the total sales area and sales for 2020 will be 1.76 billion square meters and 1.736 billion yuan respectively.
The Crane Research Center calculates that if the growth rate of commercial housing sales in November is maintained in December 2021, the sales area and amount of commercial housing for the whole year will increase by 2.1% and 5% respectively over 2020.
The agency predicts that the scale of commercial housing sales for the whole year will reach a new high, with area and value exceeding 1.8 billion square meters and 18 trillion yuan respectively.
However, the poor transaction situation of the overall real estate market, which is still at a high level, has also become an important feature in 2021.
"Our statistics show that the cumulative trading amount in the first half of the year increased by 36.8% year-on-year. Of course, this was also due to the 2020 epidemic, when the market fell to the bottom in the first quarter." said Ding Zuyu, CEO of E-House (China) Enterprise Holdings Co., Ltd.
The outside world has noticed that the obvious "cooling" of the real estate market has emerged from the second half of the year and when some real estate companies encountered problems.
But in fact, relevant statistics have already revealed clues in the first half of the year.
Judging from the data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the national real estate development investment growth rate, commercial housing sales area and sales growth rate will basically show a downward trend in 2021, of which the growth rate of development investment has increased from 38.3% in January-February. It fell to 6.0% from January to November. At the same time, the real estate development prosperity index also declined from 101.45 at its peak in February to 100.51 in November, the lowest level in the past year.
The China Index Academy reported that in the 50 key cities it monitored, the transaction area of newly-built commercial residential buildings in 2021 increased slightly year-on-year, and the absolute scale was second only to the same period in 2016. However, the market significantly cooled down in the second half of the year, and the transaction scale fell to 2015 in the second half of the year. The lowest level since the same period of the year, the first-tier and second-tier representative cities increased 18.0% and 5.8% year-on-year in new commercial residential area transactions, while the third-tier representative cities fell by 2.0%.
At the same time, the average monthly transaction area of newly-built commercial residential buildings in 50 cities was approximately 33.24 million square meters, a year-on-year increase of 4.6%, but in the second half of the year, the year-on-year decline was more than 20%.
In 2021, regulation is still the key word of the market.
According to a statistics from the Crane Research Center, as of December 20, 2021, various provinces and cities in China have undergone a total of 249 adjustment policies, including more than 20 times in Shenzhen and Guangzhou alone.
Judging from the content of the control policy, in addition to purchase restrictions, loan restrictions, price restrictions, and sales restrictions, second-hand housing reference prices have also become the focus of regulation in 2021.
Since the reference price of second-hand housing transactions in Shenzhen on February 8 last year, and the release of the price list of thousands of communities in the city, a total of 15 cities across the country have implemented this policy. The China Finger Academy reported that some cities are affected by the "reference of second-hand housing transactions. The superimposed influence of the “price” policy has caused the second-hand housing market to cool down even more.
The pace of real estate expansion slows down
In the domestic real estate market, the operation and development of real estate companies are inseparable from the concepts of loan financing and land acquisition. The scale of real estate companies has continued to expand in the past few years, but in 2021, this situation has also changed.
In the first half of the year, under the background of the continuous tightening of credit-related policies and the requirements of the "three red lines" of real estate financing, the total financing of real estate enterprises has fallen.
According to incomplete statistics from the Crane Research Center, the financing volume of 100 typical real estate companies in 2021 is 1,287.3 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 26%. The financing volume has experienced negative growth for the first time in the past five years and reached its lowest point in five years.
In terms of quarters, the first quarter dropped slightly year-on-year, and the year-on-year decline from the second quarter to the fourth quarter continued to expand. In the fourth quarter, as of December 20, the financing volume was 176.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 55%.
Corresponding to the decrease in financing volume, the cost of financing has decreased. In 2021, the cost of new bond financing was 5.32%, a decrease of 0.99% compared with 2020.
However, the Crane Research Center believes that this is mainly due to the increase in domestic bond issuance and the tightening of the financing environment, which has led to the concentration of bond issuance to outstanding real estate companies, which has lowered the cost of bond issuance.
While financing shrinks, real estate companies' desire to acquire land for development has also diminished.
According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the area of land purchased by real estate development enterprises from January to November 2021 was 182.87 million square meters, a year-on-year decrease of 11.2%.
After calculating the scale of land supply and demand in 300 cities across the country, the Zhongzhi Institute came to the conclusion that the scale was significantly reduced.
In 2021, 1.22 billion square meters of residential land in various cities will be launched, a year-on-year decrease of 9.2%. The absolute scale is the lowest level in the past four years. The transaction of residential land is 840 million square meters, a year-on-year decrease of 26.1%. The transfer fee is 4.8 trillion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 6.7 %, and the average transaction floor price was 5651 yuan/square meter, an increase of 26.3% year-on-year.
For many key cities, a new change in the land market in 2021 is centralized land supply, that is, multiple rounds of concentrated land transfer within a year.
The first round of centralized land supply in Guangzhou and other cities attracted competition from real estate companies, but the second and third rounds of centralized land supply since the second half of the year have seen a significant decline in popularity.
Beijing Capital Securities Research Report believes that the main reason is the adjustment of land auction rules in some cities and the return of housing companies to rationality.
On the one hand, some cities have become more stringent in scrutinizing the development qualifications and funding sources of real estate companies during the second round of land supply. On the other hand, the pressure on real estate companies’ cash flow has increased and their willingness to auction land has returned to rationality, and the expected profit margin has not improved significantly. Under the premise of low enthusiasm for participating in the shoot.
Further contraction in 2022?
As an important player in the market, real estate companies have already sniffed market changes, so as early as last August, during the disclosure season of the interim report, the management of listed real estate companies more or less put forward the "stability".
"The rules of the game in the entire industry are changing, and the development thinking of enterprises needs to be adjusted accordingly. Too much pursuit of scale and speed-oriented linear thinking may be unsustainable." Vanke President Zhu Jiusheng once said that the word "stable" is the top priority. Vanke's current response.
Mo Bin, President of Country Garden, pointed out that the industry as a whole has entered a new stage of development, and that good products and services are the foundation for the sound development of the company, and that Country Garden needs full-cycle comprehensive competitiveness.
According to the report of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, real estate companies, facing the tight financing situation in the industry, are focusing more on the development of their main business and financial security, instead of simply pursuing scale expansion, and then seeking high-quality growth.
"According to calculations, it is estimated that the average annual size of the industry in the next five years is 1.06 billion-1.27 billion square meters, with a median of more than 1.1 billion square meters, which is basically the same as the level from 2015 to 2016." Ding Zuyu believes that if commercial housing is included In total, the annual turnover is still around 15 trillion yuan.
Compared with other industries, the scale of the entire real estate industry is still very large.
The Crane Research Center believes that the impact of residents' purchasing power overdraft effect has been revealed, and it is expected that the scale of commercial housing sales will further shrink in 2022.
It is worth noting that the recent Central Economic Work Conference proposed to support the commercial housing market to better meet the reasonable housing needs of buyers, and to implement urban policies to promote a virtuous circle and healthy development of the real estate industry.
Li Yujia, chief researcher of the Guangdong Provincial Housing Policy Research Center, believes that this is a manifestation of the modernization of the industry's governance system and governance capabilities.
"Essentially, it is to treat real estate as an industry, respect its industry rules, neither instrumentalize nor demonize it. It is necessary to prevent financialization and bubbles, and to give full play to its status as a pillar industry."
■ Big coffee said
Ding Zuyu, CEO of E-House (China) Enterprise Holdings Co., Ltd.:
Future Housing Enterprise
"Path dependency" should be changed
On the afternoon of December 31, 2021, the annual conference of Ding Zuyu's review of the property market with the theme "Leapfrogging" was held in Shanghai.
At the press conference, Ding Zuyu pointed out that in the past five years, the real estate market has experienced a certain degree of "overdraft" in terms of demand, housing prices, affordability, and supply. At the same time, some real estate companies need to pay attention to the excessive pursuit of scale in recent years.
"In the past five years, a total of 7.4 billion square meters and 63 trillion yuan were sold, accounting for 41% and 56% of the past 20 years. That is to say, it took only 5 years to sell 56% of the past 20 years." Ding Zuyu pointed out In the past five years, the number of newly entered cities by the top 100 real estate companies accounted for more than 50%. Since 2014, the full-caliber sales compound annual growth rate of the top 100 real estate companies has reached 25%, and sales, financing, and investment have shown rapid expansion.
Ding Zuyu believes that the changes in the real estate market in 2021 are closely related to market overdrafts, and gave a set of data: in the past 10 years, the balance of personal housing loans reached 38.1 trillion yuan, and the leverage of residents increased by 6.68 times, far exceeding the real estate market. Sales and sales area increased, and at the same time, it was much faster than the growth of house prices.
In addition, the pursuit of scale by real estate companies has also led to the fact that the growth rate of interest-bearing liabilities of real estate companies is higher than the growth rate of sales, and the balance sheet in the financial statements has been turned into a "liability sheet."
Ding Zuyu pointed out that real estate companies have experienced the phenomenon of off-balance sheet on-balance sheet.
"The on-balance sheet net debt ratio of major listed real estate companies fell below 70% in the first half of the year, but this does not mean that the debt has really fallen, because off-balance sheet liabilities have been created," he said. 40 real estate companies in the first half of 2021 Both internal interest-bearing liabilities and off-balance sheet interest-bearing liabilities are 3.8 trillion yuan, with a ratio of 1:1, and the ratio of some companies is as high as 2.3 times. The pressure is beyond doubt.
"Excessive financialization of real estate is the root cause of today's crisis."
"I think the first thing that needs to be changed today is'path dependence.'" Ding Zuyu believes that the premise of the high debt and high turnover growth model of real estate companies is based on rising housing prices, improving markets, and maintaining financing, but when these premises After it ceases to exist, this model cannot be sustained. Therefore, the development path should be reshaped. "The first thing that real estate companies will do in the future is long-termism, insisting on doing the'difficult and correct' things, but operating with integrity, and shouldering the burden in the future. More social responsibility."
Nanfang Daily reporter Ge Zhenghan