Shanghai Daily news

Shanghai's housing authority will intensify efforts to improve the transparency of the city's residential property market, including reducing the developers' land inventory this year.
Cai Yutian, director of the Shanghai Housing and Land Administrative Bureau, said yesterday that some developers stock up land to make higher profit when prices rise. Currently, the developers have land reserves covering a total of 6,000 hectares (60 million square meters) in Shanghai.
"As the city's housing prices keep surging, some developers tend to hold the land in a bid to gain more," Cai said at the Hong Kong Infrastructure and Real Estate Services Expo, which is held at ShanghaiMart till tomorrow.
Cai said that the housing bureau will draft policies to encourage the developers to start construction.
He also added that Shanghai will learn from other provinces on how they manage their land policies.
In Jiangsu Province, for instance, developers pay taxes to the government if they hold their land for more than a year.
Industry insiders said the developers are holding onto their land, as an open bidding system in land leasing in Shanghai has made it difficult for them to acquire new plots.
"The land cost has been boosted in open bidding when some developers offer irrationally high prices betting on the booming real estate market," said Edward Cheung, general manager of DTZ Debenham Tie Leung.
Currently, the per-square-meter land cost in downtown areas like Xuhui and Luwan districts has already risen to about 8,000 yuan (US$964).
That in turn will lead to even higher residential prices.
To discourage developers from building up too much land reserves and to maintain a healthy real estate industry, the Shanghai housing bureau aims to raise requirement on the transparency level for the developers.
For instance, sales information of new projects needs to be published online and should include information like per-square-meter price, sales volume, and the availability of residential units for sale.
"Some developers keep apartments back from sale especially when there is demand for a particular project. They do this in the hope that prices will climb," Cai said. "This practice should be banned to safeguard home buyers' benefit."
Meanwhile, the bureau is working on an alert system tracking the city's overall real estate market, including land leasing information, property management and trading prices.