Although China has a population of 1.4 billion, that will not be enough to fill all the empty apartments spread across the country, a former official said in a rare public criticism of the country’s crisis-hit real estate market. China’s real estate sector has declined since 2021, when the giant China Evergrande Real Estate Group failed to pay its debt obligations. Big-name developers, such as Country Garden Holdings, continue to fall close to default.
Data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed that at the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes reached 648 million square meters. This equates to nearly 7.2 million homes based on an average house size of 90 square metres, Reuters reported, adding that many residential projects have already been sold but have not yet been completed due to cash flow problems.
“How many vacant homes are there now? Every expert gives a completely different figure, with the most extreme believing that the current number of vacant homes is enough for three billion people,” said He Qing, former deputy head of the Census Bureau.
“This estimate may be a bit high, but 1.4 billion people probably cannot fill that number,” he explained at a forum in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, according to a video posted by state media China News Service.
Earlier, a Foreign Ministry spokesman confirmed that the Chinese economy is “resilient.”
The spokesman said in a recent press conference: “All kinds of comments predicting the collapse of the Chinese economy continue to appear from time to time, but what collapsed is such rhetoric, not the Chinese economy.”
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