LAND sales on the mainland were heating up as big developers accumulated land to push smaller competitors out of the market, South China Morning Post reported yesterday, quoting analysts.
With policy-risk hanging over the residential market in the short term, the attention of developers had shifted to commercial sites, the report said.
Feng Huiming, an executive director of Shenzhen-based developer Fantasia Holdings, said several recent commercial-site deals were evidence of that trend.
China Vanke early this month bought six sites in Shenzhen that offered mixed-use development with commercial and hotel elements, while Hopson Development Holdings paid 6.87 billion yuan (US$1.03 billion) for a commercial site in Beijing s Tongzhou district and finalized a 1.56 billion yuan deal to buy a commercial site in Shanghai.
Elsewhere, there was a purchase last week by Shanghai Greenland of a commercial property in Guangzhou s Baiyun New Town for 1.44 billion yuan.
Meanwhile, the big developers interest in residential sites remained keen, leading analysts to conclude that the common thread to the activity was a push by the large players to force out smaller property concerns, the newspaper said. The upshot was that the mainland s fast-growing and highly fragmented real estate industry was likely to consolidate, the newspaper quoted analysts as saying.
Some analysts said the switch to commercial land banks would present developers with challenges.
This is a very different market, said Richard David, the chief executive of Treasury China Trust, a Singapore business focused on commercial real estate on the mainland.
David said commercial properties required management skills that mainland developers lacked.(SD-Agencies)
