Cooling real estate market takes toll on profits of developers

A pedestrian walks past a construction site of a residential apartment project developed by China Vanke Co Ltd in Tianjin. The company posted 1.53 billion yuan in net profits in the first quarter, registering the first year on year drop of 5.23 percent in 13 years. Provided to China Daily

More than half of the listed real estate companies reported lackluster performances marked by shrinking year-on-year net profits in the first quarter, according to the Shanghai-based Wind Information Co Ltd.

The total net profits of the 142 companies, which stood at 11.74 billion yuan ($1.88 billion), were down by 5.36 percent from the same period last year. Seventy-four of them reported shrinking net profits.

China Vanke Co Ltd, which posted 1.53 billion yuan in net profits by the end of March, registered the first year-on-year drop of 5.23 percent in 13 years.

Tan Huajie, secretary of Vanke's board of directors, told Beijing-based Securities Daily that completed floor space in the first three months accounted for only 6.6 percent of the year's total.

"Most of the sales settlements took place in the latter half of the year, particularly in the fourth quarter," said Tan.

China Merchants Property Development Co Ltd achieved net profits of 755 million yuan, 6.82 percent less than the first quarter in the previous year.

Gemdale Corp's first-quarter net profits plunged by 73.65 percent year-on-year to 49.34 million yuan.

China Poly Group Corp was the only one among the top four real estate companies to record bigger profits, an increase of 10.8 percent from the same period last year, of 820 million yuan. But it signed contracts worth only 10.37 billion yuan in the first quarter, down 13.83 percent year-on-year.

Commercial residential building area sold stood at 200 million square meters in the first quarter, representing a 3.8 percent year-on-year drop. The sales volume totaled 1.3 trillion yuan, down 5.2 percent year-on-year.

Smaller sales area and volume both contributed to the bounce in residential building sales in the first quarter in 2013, said Vanke.

Compared with the same period in 2012, the sales area had increased by 33.2 percent in the first quarter. In the 14 major cities in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, the new supply and sold areas were largely balanced.

A report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences said that the decrease in sales area is pushing the demand in different cities in different directions. On the one hand, cities with an overheated market will ease up in demand, while third- and fourth-tier cities are facing the risk of oversupply.

Land purchases slowed down as well. The 20 largest real estate companies spent only 13.3 billion yuan on new land in April, a decrease of more than half from the 29.1 billion yuan spent last April, according to a report by Centaline Property Agency Ltd.

Zhang Dawei, an analyst at Centaline, said the decrease was partly due to real estate companies' weaker profitability. But also, these companies had sufficient land reserves in 2013, when new purchases amounted to 558.6 billion yuan.

Quarterly land supply dropped for the first time since 2013, according to China Index Academy. The 300 indexed cities in China introduced 340 million square meters to the market, down 3.8 percent year-on-year. These cities achieved 270 million square meters' sales volume, down 15.3 percent year-on-year.