We recently met with Andrew Clifford (Chief Investment Officer - Platinum Asset Management) and asked him whether he thinks the Chinese property market is about to crash.
Andrew puts perspective on the Chinese property market in the video below. A full transcript follows.
China’s Property Market, Is It About To Crash? Transcript
Mark Draper: Andrew, a lot of talk in Australian media at the moment about the Chinese Property Market which is important to Australia as a flow on and domino effect. Are we about to see a Chinese Property Market crash or where is the property market at there?
Andrew Clifford : Yeah, we’re not so concerned about the residential market in China. There are a few things we’d look at. Certainly there’s always a talk about the Ghost Cities and some of those certainly do exist but if you look at the broader context, there are reasons to be not so negative. Let’s say. So lets look at some of the numbers. So since we started private ownership of property commenced in 1999 in China, we’ve probably built about the order of one hundred million apartments since then. So if you think about it that, that represents the entire modern housing stock of China. So that leads a few hundred million households still living in communist housing, not that pleasant perhaps. Now maybe a question about affordability is indeed very significant latent demand for residential property and we expect that to be a significant part of this economy for some time to come. In terms of prices whether they’re too high or not, one of the things we’d look at is the development of the secondary market in property and in the big cities now as much as 40% of the turnover on property is the secondary market where you have individual owner selling to an individual buyer. And interestingly we’ve got a market here where there is millions of apartments turning over and prices are only down by a few percent from the highs, eighteen months ago.
Mark Draper: And the activity is actually trending up in tier one or tier two cities.
Andrew Clifford: So indeed, so when we look at the inventories and unsold inventories they’re not really that significant and those cities now, they’re going to be with the ghost cities, they’re going to tier three and four cities. Population growth is muted whereas in the big cities populations are growing at 3 or 4 percent so really again this underpins the demand here. I think also in terms of, you know, lets look at how big this market was and you know people get afraid because the numbers are big so we would probably at the peak building twelve million apartments but again what I would tell you is on a population adjusted basis is not very different to what we’re building in Australia today.
Mark Draper: Right.
Andrew Clifford: Perhaps that tells you more about Australia than China but the thing is that ,again, look there will be developers who will go bust because they’ve got bad developments there will be bad loans coming out of the industry but we don’t think it is a completely dire situation as it gets painted often in the paper.
Mark Draper: Thank you very much for your insights, Andrew. That’s really good information.
Andrew Clifford: Thank you.