About this Newsletter: Get a quick but finer view of (still) one of the most important sectors in China, with the weekly chart and commentary from Real Estate Foresight (REF) - drawing on 13+ years of REF's research on China housing markets.

After a period of 'improvement' in that the major growth metrics for the new home sales market were turning less negative for a while, we now see some key official indicators for November (released a few days ago on Monday, Dec 15) turning more negative again.

In absolute terms, as the charts below show, it's been a continued and consistent decline, the new home sales market getting smaller and cheaper.

We use here our calculated 12-month measures for new home sales, residential new starts, and residential investment, along with the new home price index (as a simple average for 70 major cities), all based on the underlying data from China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS):

A Longer Term View:

Last 12 Months:

The big question remains unchanged. For the new home sales market/segment, what should be the normalised viable annual demand in sqm GFA?

At the peak of the market, the figure reached over 1.6 billion sqm on an annual basis. Currently, the 12-month new home sales are at 0.7 billion sqm.

Even with this significant decline so far, the RMB value of new home sales for the last 12 months stands at RMB 7.4 trillion, or over USD 1 trillion (at 1 USD = 7 RMB).

It's also important to note how policymakers have been increasingly framing the discussion about the housing market in terms of the combined new homes and the secondary market, with a sense of the overall stabilisation.

The secondary market is taking a rising share of the total, though without a consistent comparable national-level data series from NBS.