The Chinese government has outlawed property development by state-owned enterprises whose core business is not real estate and ordered them to produce plans by mid-April on how they will leave the industry.
The ruling from the state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission bars 78 state-owned conglomerates from the property sector and orders them to speed up their restructuring to divest related investments in an “orderly” way.
A surge in land prices, particularly in big centres such as Shanghai and Beijing, has been blamed partly on inexperienced state-owned companies with easy access to credit overbidding on land auctions as a way of speculating in the property market.