That does it. China's real estate is officially a runaway train.
In just three months, January to March 31, the price of land sold in Shanghai rose 172%. Transaction volume rose 55.7% to 1,488,500 square meters in the city, according to real estate news and information portal Soufun.
The sales of land for housing, excluding government-funded affordable homes, totaled 566,800 square meters in the three months ending March 31, or 6.93 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) in value, Soufun said.
Nine out of 14 residential land transactions in the first quarter of this year sold at an average premium over the sales price of a whopping 30.39%.
In 2012, the average premium rate of residential land was around 8.9% in the second quarter, 15.08% in the third and 22.33% in the fourth. The trend is clear.
The premium rate is rising at the same time transaction volume continues to rise, with many new developments already sold out before the foundation even gets installed.
"Robust home sales since the second half of last year have boosted real estate developers' prospects for the market and therefore triggered their appetite for land bank expansion," Zhang Wanyu, an analyst at Soufun,was quoted saying in Shanghai Daily on Thursday.
