Real estate companies have recently been very active at land auctions in many cities across China as the market confidence has been boosted by the country's constant adjustment of policies.
The capital city of Beijing held its first land auction of the year on Jan 2, with the final prices of two plots totaling 18.1924 billion yuan (about 2.48 billion U.S. dollars) and an average premium rate of 21.04 percent. The bidding for one plot reached 244 rounds.
Both plots are purely for residential purpose with no supporting construction and no restrictions on land prices or sales price guidances.
On Dec 31, Shanghai sold out its last batch of seven residential sites for 2024 with a total price of 19.225 billion yuan (about 2.62 billion U.S. dollars).
Chengdu City in southwest China's Sichuan Province sold four plots during a combined auction at the end of 2024.
Hangzhou City of east China's Zhejiang Province sold seven plots on Dec 31, with the starting prices totaling 11.19 billion yuan (about 1.53 billion U.S. dollars).
A few days ago, Wuhan City in central China's Hubei Province held its biggest land auction of 2024, reaching 30 deals on more than 240 hectares of land in total.
Since September 2024, Wuhan has taken a variety of measures in accordance with local conditions to put land to good use, including increasing the supply of high-quality plots in the main urban area, setting reasonable land prices, strictly controlling the increment and improving the quality of land. As a result, the city's land auctions have become more active.
"These policies can effectively help put existing idle land or land with stagnant development into good use. We have proactively launched a batch of 'small but good' and 'small but beautiful' plots. After they were released in the market, we can see there has been fierce bidding for many plots," said Kang Chun, director of Wuhan Land Trading Center.
According to statistics from the China Index Academy, the improvement of the situation in the national land market at the end of 2024 was mainly driven by the entry of core land in first-tier cities into the market.
In the last two months of 2024, the first-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen supplied 4.74 million square meters of land, accounting for 31 percent of the annual total. The total prices of the land sold in the two months reached 146.1 billion yuan (about 19.92 billion U.S. dollars), up 69 percent year on year.
Chinese cities see heated land auctions after policies boost real estate market confidence
