Shanghai property market is ‘overheated,’ top city official says

BEIJING / Bloomberg

Shanghai’s most-senior official said the city’s property market has “overheated” and should be more tightly controlled after a recent surge in residential housing prices.
“An irrational and overheated sentiment have emerged in the Shanghai real estate market, and these sentiments have raised home prices,” Han Zheng, the city’s Communist Party chief, said at briefing during annual legislative meetings in Beijing.
Residential home prices in China’s so-called first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Shenzhen have surged amid a relaxation of housing curbs intended to boost real estate investment and increased monetary stimulus from the central bank. New home prices in Shanghai jumped 2.2 percent in January from a month earlier, while existing home prices increased 2.7 percent from a month earlier, the most since 2013, according to data from the nation’s statistics bureau.
Last month, lines of prospective buyers outside property agents’ offices in a Shanghai suburb clogged roads and forced police to curb traffic to maintain order, Caixin reported. The frenzy prompted the city government to issued a call for calm on its official microblog account.
Han said his city would strengthen housing regulations without giving details on specific measures, saying only that regulations should be “scientific as housing is a specialty commodity.”