戴德梁行：今日全球楼市速览(2010.04.22)

Mainland China

1. Powered by strong domestic demand, China's economy is expected to grow by 10 percent in 2010, the International Monetary Fund said yesterday. The IMF said the global economy, after enduring a crippling recession, should see better-than-expected growth this year, led by strength in China and other developing nations. The world economy would expand 4.2 percent this year, a 0.3 percentage point increase from its January forecast and a sharp improvement from 2009 when global output fell by 0.6 percent, the worst performance since World War II. However, the international lending agency warned that the recovery still remained vulnerable with the biggest threat likely to come from a surge in government debt burdens. For 2011, the IMF projected global growth of 4.3 percent, no change from its January outlook. The IMF expects wide disparities between regions, with the United States outperforming Europe and Japan but lagging behind China and other developing nations. For the US, the IMF expects growth of 3.1 percent this year, after a 2.4 percent plunge in US gross domestic product in 2009, the biggest decline since 1946. (Shanghai Daily).

Hong Kong

1. The government yesterday trumpeted a raft of proposals - not all of them new - to cool the property market and make sales of new flats more transparent, and threatened more if they don't do the job. But they may have little impact. Investors certainly didn't think they would - there was no big sell-off of shares in developers. The measures include requiring developers to sell more units in the first batch of sales at a new development - a move intended to limit their ability to manipulate prices. The threats include an increase in stamp duty on non-luxury flats, a ban on reselling unfinished homes - a practice popular with speculators - and requiring developers to put all flats up for sale within a certain period. The government may also extend to cheaper flats two measures recently applied to sales of flats worth HK$20 million or more - a stamp duty increase and a ban on deferring payment of duty - if there is excessive speculation in such properties. (SCMP).

2.   The government is putting two residential sites up for auction in an effort to increase flat supply, as new figures show Hong Kong buyers now pay more than 40 per cent of the median income on their mortgages. The announcement comes less than two months after the sites, in Ho Man Tin and Mount Nicholson, were listed among six the government said it would put up for auction within the next two years if their sale had not been triggered by applications from developers. Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah said the auctions were being initiated to demonstrate the government’s determination to increase land supply and to reduce the risk of a property bubble. (SCMP).

3. Shun Tak Holdings says net profit last year surged more than 27 times to HK$2.87 billion as property prices rose. It proposed a dividend of 18.7 HK cents. (The Standard).