Renovation Under Way: China Property Developers Making Longer-Term Investments

By RUSSELL FLANNERY

Many of the entrepreneurs that today rank as China’s richest real estate developers made their early money from selling apartments to the country’s growing middle class. Focusing on apartments and residential property made sense: residential projects generated cash quickly for then-young businesses that didn’t have much financial staying power when the government first opened up the industry more than a decade ago.

Yet as successful companies have built up their resources and even gone public, they are increasingly looking to make longer-term investments in commercial property such as office buildings and malls that can generate long-term income from rents. “A lot of big local developers have emerged in the last five years or so, and they want to build a stand-alone portfolio of office buildings and malls,” Steven McCord, associate director of research at Jones Lang LaSalle said in a meeting of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club on Thursday.

The speed of that push varies across different markets in China, but the longer-term trend is clear, McCord said. Companies that once focused on residential property that have become more active in commercial investments include China Vanke, Shimao Property Holdings, CR Land and Greentown China, he says.

The change is part of an evolution of the real estate industry in China since the country launched its economic reforms three decades ago. When government opened the way for the private capital in the 1990s, young local developers didn’t have the money to make long-term investments. So in Shanghai, for instance, many of the office buildings put up in that era were built by relatively well-off overseas Chinese, especially from Hong Kong. Among them: iconic Plaza 66 along Nanjing West Road, which was developed by Hong Kong’s Chan family. Younger domestic private sector developers focused on housing projects that would generate cash flow quickly.

Over time, however, they added mixed-use residential-commercial sites that at a minimum included retail space for shops to serve the nearby residents and were able to produce long-term income from rents, rather than just one-off revenue from selling the space. Now, some are even in the process of building office towers, McCord says.

Growing single-investor ownership of buildings would be good for the stability of property markets in the country. Sole owners of whole buildings usually have the financial wherewithal to make it through market downturns, McCord says.

Shanghai’s Lujiazui office district, for instance, a decade ago had a vacancy rate of more than 40%, but it didn’t turn into a full-blown financial crisis because the owners could ride out the storm and carry the property on their books.

Growing interest in commercial property may also be good news for real estate consulting companies like Jones Lang LaSalle that help manage property. It would also benefit companies such as E-House of Shanghai, which recently set up a property management subsidiary.

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