by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge
No matter how the Evergrande drama plays out, whether it culminates with an uncontrolled, chaotic default and/or liquidation which sparks a crash in real estate values, or with Beijing blinking and bailing out the core pillar of China’s housing market, remember that Evergrande is just a symptom of the trends that have whipsawed China’s property market in the past year, which has seen significant contraction as a result of Beijing policies seeking to tighten financial conditions as part of Xi’s new “common prosperity” drive which among other things, seeks to make housing much more affordable to everyone, not just the richest.
So before we go further, a quick reminder of the sharp deterioration observed in the past few months which has been a direct (if reflexive) contributor to Evergrande’s downfall and which we touched on last week in “Chinese Data Dump Confirms Hard Landing Imminent” in which we noted something stunning: according to WIND, growth in land sales in value terms in the 100-city sample, a proxy for land purchases by property developers, slumped to -90.4% Y/Y during 1-12 September form -65.0% in August. In volume (floor space) terms, it also dropped sharply to -38.3% y-o-y from -21.9%.
Picking up on this weakness in the property market…
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