Inquiring minds are reading an excellent report China Real Estate Unravels by Patrick Chovanec, a professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management in Beijing, China.



The report confirms many of the things I said would happen in regards to the Chinese real estate bubble and GDP.



Here are a few items of note.



Developers, burdened by 70% leverage ratios and loans threatening to come due, rushed to complete projects already in their pipeline, to put those units onto the market and raise cash.



That rush to complete inflated real estate investments, allegedly up 23.5% in the first quarter. Other statistics from the report tell the real story.





Year-on-year sales in Q1, for all real estate, was down 14.6%.

Residential property sales were down 17.5%

Office sales were down -10.2%

Sales in January-February were a disaster, falling 20.9% overall, compared to the first two months of 2011, -24.7% for residential.

Total amount of floor space “for sale” was up 35.5%, compared to the same date last year

Floor space of residential units “for sale” grew 47.4%.

At the end of 2011, total floor space “under construction” was roughly 4.6 times the floor space sold

A year and a half worth of excess inventory is hidden somewhere in the pipeline

New starts in April fell 14.6% year-on-year and 27.0% month-on-month, for property as a whole

Housing starts fell -14.4% year-on-year and -23.4% month-on-month

Office starts fell -21.0% year-on-year in April, and -45.1% compared to March

Retail property starts fell -18.7% year-on-year, and -36.8% compared to March

Land sale revenues in April (RMB 27 billion) were down -54.7% compared to April last year

Foreign funding for property development was down -91.4% in March and -80.8% in April, compared to the same months last year.

The “resilient” growth in real estate investment that seemed to promise a “soft landing” is not very resilient at all. It’s more like the last gasp of a market that’s running out of steam. Once the surge in completions plays out, the declining number of new starts will become the pipeline, and growth in property investment will flatten or go negative.



Property investment accounts for roughly a quarter of gross Fixed Asset Investment (FAI), and net FAI accounts for over half of China’s GDP growth. As I noted in January, in a back-of-the-envelope thought exercise, if property investment plateaus (growth falls to zero), it could shave as much as 2.6 percentage points off of real GDP growth. If it fell 10% (in real, not nominal terms) it could bring GDP growth down to 5.3%.



At the time I first saw this dynamic in the data, when the Q1 numbers came out, I figured it would take several months to begin playing out. But the April numbers suggest it is already happening.

The longer China puts off rebalancing its economy, the bigger the crash later on. Moreover, widening the band on its currency is a needed part of that rebalancing, and does not preclude in any way a huge slowdown in growth.



The structural imbalances in China are large and for now, still growing. However, huge cracks have appeared in real estate, and changes are coming up with a regime change. Finally, peak oil alone makes many of the growth estimates we have seen for China outright impossible.