Strong sentiment among home buyers remained unabated in Shanghai last week despite continued inadequate supply, latest market data suggest.
The area of new residential properties sold, excluding government-subsidized affordable housing, climbed 2.1 percent week over week to 567,000 square meters, the third consecutive increase since mid August, Shanghai Centaline Real Estate Agency Co said in a report released today.
"Outlying districts continued to lead with Qingpu and Songjiao registering extremely robust sales, closely followed by Pudong New Area," said Lu Wenxi, senior research manager at Shanghai Centaline. "In particular, the daily transaction volume of new houses just exceeded 150,000 square meters per day during the last three days of August, two or three times more than the volume in regular days."
Average cost of these new homes remained almost unchanged at 43,549 yuan ($6,507) per square meter, staying above the 40,000-yuan-per-square-meter threshold for the third straight week, Centaline data showed.
Among the 10 most popular projects, three cost more than 40,000 yuan per square meter and two of them bear a price tag of less than 20,000 yuan per square meter.
On the supply side, about 81,000 square meters of new homes were released to the local market last week, a weekly retreat of 2.2 percent.
"New home supply is expected to remain lackluster for one or two more weeks as some real estate developers are rescheduling their releases following red hot sales over the past two weeks," Lu said.
As of today, the local inventory of new houses stood at around 7.12 million square meters, according to the city's official real estate website.
