All Roads Lead to China: Business News, Analysis, and Insights from China

With Bejing’s measures to cool off the economy have gutted out a number of developers recently, a few have seen this as an opportunity to continue looking for investments.  The Singaporean group Capitaland being one of them, and in the recent WSJ piece CapitaLand Sees Plenty of Spark in China, its CEO Liew Mun Leong […]

– Guest Writer Zhou Ji Ming While attending a recent industry event, the conversation again turned to the probability of China introducing REITS this year as an alternative fund raising vehicle for real estate companies. The general consensus was that, at the moment at least, a number of competing factors are making introducing a REIT […]

Later that week, while walking from Xintiandi to Huai Hai plaza (roughly 1km) to an event, I took out my iPhone camera to capture one of those moments where I realized that all the good economic recovery news was not translating to the street. In short, over the course of my 1km journey, I captured […]

There was a time when the only coffee outfit was Starbucks, and its knock off SPR. Along Nanjing Road, the highest concentration existed with 5 stores between the Portman hotel and People’s park, and in total there were roughly 80 by the end of last year (as you can see from the map above). Over […]

– by Zhou Ji Ming Life among Beijing’s commercial office landlords these days is tough at the moment. With vacancy rates expected to climb above 25% during Q3 and average rents falling to below RMB 200 per square meter per month, landlords are facing potentially the toughest situation any landlords have faced since office rents […]

Over the past week I had the opportunity to survey what is known collectively as Shanghai’s ‘North Bund’ project site and adjacent project sites.  I had not visited that area of Shanghai in quite a while so I read up a bit before the trek. Anyone involved in Shanghai real estate these days, especially on […]

The Chinese web site Sohu reported one of the more bizarre episodes in recent memory, as one building of a multi-phase residential construction project literally fell over in an early morning rain storm killing one person on the construction site. The 13-floor building is – was – located on Shanghai’s Jian Hua Nan Lu in […]

For those looking for good news on China’s property market, I am not sure if the recent JLL Property Market Monitor will be the document you were hoping for, but Steven McCrord’s Page 1 was sobering for me: Total prime retail stock in 21 major Chinese cities will grow at a CAGR of 20.2% through […]