Shanghai Daily news

Shanghai's second-hand housing prices continued to rise last month, making it difficult for some buyers to obtain a mortgage loan.
The benchmark index for second-hand housing jumped 3.8 percent to 1,547 points in January from a month earlier, the Shanghai Existing Property Index Office reported yesterday.
"Due to the limited inventory of second-hand properties, residences in the downtown area led January's growth," the office said.
The average price growth within the Inner Ring Road reached 4.7 percent last month, compared with 3.7 percent for units located between the Inner Ring Road and the Middle Ring Road.
Prices jumped even faster for second-hand apartments around Pudong's Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, surging 6.3 percent to 5,286 yuan (US$637) per square meter last month.
"The prices of second-hand houses are expected to continue to grow in Shanghai in the following months thanks to rapid economic development and huge market demand," said Wang Yun, an analyst at the property office.
Meanwhile, the increasing property values mean that more mortgage applications are being turned down.
"The risks in loans for buyers of second-hand houses are higher than for new houses," said an official at the Agricultural Bank of China's Shanghai Branch.
"Most second-hand house buyers have comparatively less financial strength. In addition, the prices of second-hand houses have grown too fast, a factor that adds to potential risks," said the banking official.
Several local lenders have stopped providing mortgage loans to buyers of used apartments.
And some analysts fear the property market is becoming overvalued.
A recent Citigroup report said that Shanghai, together with Ningbo, Tianjin and Shenyang, are experiencing bubbles in their real estate markets as housing prices in those cities have grown faster than income levels for at least four consecutive quarters.
"If housing prices consistently outpace incomes then it becomes more probable that a bubble stage has been reached," Huang Yiping, an economist at Citigroup, said in the report.
Shanghai residents' average disposable income was 16,683 yuan last year, a rise of 12.1 percent from a year earlier, compared with year-on-year growth of 15.8 percent in residential housing prices during the same period, according to the Shanghai Statistics Bureau.