Building a Better Housing Market

Despite government efforts to cool the property market, land sales in China have surged for the first five months of the year, setting record prices. More worryingly, state-owned enterprises were once again in the thick of the action, despite an order from the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) to back off.

SASAC stepped in in March 2010, after state-owned companies muscled in to outbid the competition at three separate land auctions on a single day. Other than the 16 state developers, the 78 state-owned groups whose core business was unrelated to real estate were told to get out of the market.