Property News · January 18, 2017

Smog be damned, people are still buying homes in Beijing


The post-apocalyptic air quality surely has not suffocated enthusiasm
Levels of particulate matter (PM) have exceeded 500 in Beijing. Timski/Shutterstock
Around 8,050 villas were sold in Beijing last year, a sign of confidence in a city whose air quality has literally gone up in smoke.
Weeks of pent-up winter pollution, coupled with the smog, have not dragged down the number of villas sold in the Beijing capital. If anything, they soared 119 percent year-on-year in 2016, the South China Morning Post reported.
The average value of Beijing villas also hovered at CNY37,783 (USD5,500) per square metre in 2016, a 10 percent rise from the previous year.
These findings come as air health alerts in the city shot to their highest levels yet. The air monitor index at the US embassy, which tracks the amount of polluting PM2.5 particles in the air, scored 600 in December — the index was never designed to track air quality worse than 500.
In the same month, the city saw sales of 871 luxury villas, a 23 percent increase from November.
More: China’s cooling measures mean small developers don’t stand a chance
“The worries over air problem have helped villa sales because Beijing people are now looking for properties either away from the densest urban areas or those they have good indoor air cleaning systems,” Zhang Dawei, chief analyst at real estate consultancy Centaline Property, told the Post.
The deterioration of the air quality flies in the face of sterner environmental measures from the central and local governments. “The main reason was transfer of pollution from the surrounding provinces, where steel and other heavy industry clusters have seen a resurgence in activity due to retrograde stimulus policies,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, who tracks Chinese air pollution for Greenpeace.
In 2015, the Beijing government shuttered and limited production activity in more than 10,000 factories, plants and mills in Beijing and its environs.
Read next: A sustainable Chinese city? There’s no such thing

Source : property-report.com
Read more…Smog be damned, people are still buying homes in Beijing

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