Portal
Even China’s 1.4 billion population would not be enough to fill all the empty apartments across the country, a former Foreign Ministry official said on Saturday, in a rare public criticism of the struggling housing market due to the country’s crisis.
China’s real estate sector, once a mainstay of the economy, has slumped since 2021 as property giant China Evergrande Group defaulted on its debt obligations following a crackdown on new loans.
Wellknown property developers such as Country Garden Holdings are still on the verge of insolvency, which is keeping the mood of homebuyers depressed.
“How many empty houses are there currently? Each expert gives a completely different figure, with the most extreme suggesting that the current number of empty houses is enough for 3 billion people,” said He Keng, 81, a former deputy head of the statistics department.
According to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the total area of unsold homes stood at 648 million square feet at the end of August.
That would correspond to 7.2 million apartments, according to Portal calculations, based on an average living space of 90 square meters.
This does not include the numerous residential projects that have already been sold but not yet completed due to cash flow problems, as well as the numerous empty houses that were bought by speculators during the last market recovery in 2016 and together account for the majority of unused space, experts estimate.
“This estimate may be a bit exaggerated, but 1.4 billion people are unlikely to be able to live there,” he said at a forum in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, according to a video published by official media outlet China News Service.
His negative view of the economically important sector in a public forum contrasts sharply with the official narrative that China’s economy is “resilient.”
“All sorts of comments come out from time to time predicting a collapse in China’s economy, but what was doomed was that rhetoric, not China’s economy,” a State Department spokesman said in a recent news conference.