The author has always adhered to a point of view, that is, the second-hand housing market is the real standard that can measure the property market.
For a long time, the second-hand housing market has been known as the "barometer" of the property market, because compared with the new housing market, the second-hand housing market is more free to buy and sell, depending on the personal wishes of the buyer and seller, and is not easy to be affected by macro-control measures like the new house, such as the "fall restriction order", purchase restrictions, loan restrictions and other policies are mainly aimed at the new housing market, and the direct impact on the second-hand housing market is relatively small.
According to data from the China Index Research Institute, in March 2024, the average price of new residential buildings in Baicheng increased by 0.27% month-on-month and 0.82% year-on-year, and the second-hand residential prices in Baicheng fell by 0.56% month-on-month, an increase of 0.19 percentage points from February, and the month-on-month decline has been falling for 23 consecutive months, and the year-on-year decline has expanded to 4.80%. It can be seen that for the current property market, the new housing market has picked up, while the second-hand housing market is still continuing to decline.
In fact, even the hottest cities are inevitably in this situation, and the prices of second-hand housing in the top ten cities have all fallen year-on-year and month-on-month:
Beijing: Second-hand residential prices fell by 0.76% month-on-month, a decrease of 0.27 percentage points from February; Shanghai: Second-hand residential prices in Shanghai fell by 0.55% month-on-month in March, a decrease of 0.22 percentage points from February; Guangzhou: Second-hand residential prices in Guangzhou fell by 0.35% month-on-month in March, a decrease of 0.02 percentage points from February; Shenzhen: Second-hand residential prices decreased by 0.28% month-on-month, a decrease of 0.01 percentage points from February; Hangzhou: Second-hand residential prices decreased by 0.76% month-on-month , the decline increased by 0.36 percentage points from February. Similar situations have occurred in Wuhan, Nanjing, Chengdu, Chongqing, and Tianjin.
The main reason for this is that in the past when housing prices soared, there were too many groups of people who joined the property speculation investment. Whether it's an individual or a business. According to central bank data, more than 4 percent of households hold multiple homes, and nearly 50% of listed companies hold investment properties. With the cold property market, these speculative investment groups can only sell excess real estate, and the number of listings in the second-hand housing market has increased significantly in recent years.
According to the monitoring data of Zhuge Data Research Center, the number of second-hand residential listings in the 14 key cities monitored in March increased by 54.08% year-on-year, rising year-on-year for 19 consecutive months, and the number of second-hand housing listings was 21.5 times the transaction volume. From a year-on-year perspective, the number of housing in Shenzhen, Suzhou and Hangzhou in the key 14 cities in March doubled compared with the same period last year, and Shenzhen quadrupled. That is to say, compared with March last year, the number of second-hand housing listings in 14 key cities this year has increased by 50%, and only one house can be sold for every 21.5 suites listed.
At present, on a housing platform, more than 100,000 second-hand houses in more than 10 cities such as Beijing, Hefei, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou have been listed, of which the number of listings in five cities such as Chongqing, Chengdu, Suzhou, Nanjing, and Tianjin has exceeded 150,000 units, and Chongqing and Chengdu have exceeded 200,000 units. It is important to know that these cities are cities with concentrated population inflows, and the demand for housing would have continued to rise, but even then there will inevitably be an oversupply, so it may be more difficult to sell second-hand homes for other remote cities with outflows.
So the question is, on the one hand, the new housing market is steadily picking up, on the other hand, the second-hand housing market continues to be cold, what will be the result in the future? There are three possibilities: one is that under the influence of the market's "buy up, not buy down" mentality, the number of second-hand housing listings will continue to increase greatly in the future, and eventually "the house is full", and the new housing market will be stable and falling. The second is that some investment groups that sell and speculate on houses have begun to fight a "price war", and the prices of second-hand houses have fallen rapidly, and the prices of second-hand houses have fallen sharply, driving the prices of new houses to fall.
The most likely situation is the third case, the government for the second-hand housing market to intervene in the regulation and control, many cities are currently dealing with this, such as Zhengzhou, Chongqing, Nanjing, Qingdao, Jinan, Ningbo, Lianyungang, Bozhou, Fuyang and other more than 20 cities have opened the real estate "trade-in" measures, the old houses are recycled, used as a guarantee of welfare housing, so that on the one hand, it can reduce the pressure on the second-hand housing market, on the other hand, it can also solve the problem of buying and renting difficult groups.
But the problem is that even if the old housing is "trade-in", the overall volume is still too small, for example, Zhengzhou plans to complete the second-hand housing "sell the old and buy the new, trade in the new" 10,000 units, Chongqing held a rental housing loan support plan pilot and the signing ceremony of the first batch of acquisition projects of the housing rental fund, a total of 4,207 units were acquired, compared with more than 200,000 listings. Therefore, for groups who are ready to buy and sell second-hand houses in the past two years, they should pay more attention to the changes in the second-hand housing market in their cities and seize the opportunity to buy or sell houses.