China’s housing prices fell in June for the second straight month as property developers cut prices to stoke sales amid a glut of housing in many cities.
Many home buyers have stayed on the sidelines in anticipation of further price cuts, while cases of default among smaller developers are rising as companies struggle to repay debt in a souring property market.
Average new-home prices fell 0.5% in June from May, data provider China Real Estate Index System said Monday. Prices declined 0.3% in May from April, the first month-to-month decline since June 2012.
Out of the 100 cities surveyed, 71 showed a decline in home prices, up from 62 in May.
Compared with a year earlier, average new-home prices rose by 6.48% in June, decelerating after May’s 7.8% rise and April’s 9.1% increase, China Real Estate Index System said.
Cross-posted from Investing in Chinese Stocks.
There’s been really little interesting news in the Chinese financial press the past few days, the calm before the storm that should kick off tomorrow. Here’s a look at how the new Transformers movie is being used to market real estate. This is from iFeng’s website, in what I assumed is paid promotional advertising, 楼市汽车人！出发！ Basically, they are comparing characters in the movie to real estate. Optimus Prime is the prime real estate.
The movie itself is like a 2.5 hour advertisement, the amount of product placement was over the top for both American and Chinese brands.
It’s no wonder, China’s influence on Hollywood is growing, from ‘Transformers 4′: Why the Box Office Smash is a Turning Point in China:
The world’s second largest film market cast a shadow over the move business this week, pumping up the global grosses of “Transformers: Age of Extinction” by injecting a record-breaking $90 million into its opening haul. That crushes the previous high-water market of $64.5 million for “Iron Man 3″ and nearly matches the $92.5 million that Chinese-made “Journey to the West” grossed in its first seven days of release.
In total, China contributed roughly half of the fourth “Transformers” film’s international gross and nearly matched its U.S. debut.
“It’s a turning point for the dynamic between Hollywood and China,” said Phil Contrino, vice president and chief analyst at BoxOffice.com. “This taps into a whole new potential in terms of what a movie can do when it opens at the same time in the U.S. and China.”
But it’s not all plain sailing as Bart & Fleming: Is China Hollywood’s Future, Or Folly? describes:
Everyone I encounter in town this week seems fixated on Chinese takeout — only it’s finance, not food. Specifically, funding for films and theme parks. Here’s the catch: For every mogul who claims he’s made a ‘killer deal,’ I run into ten who say their deals imploded. “Once your deal closes with the Chinese, that’s when the real negotiations begin,” according to one veteran of the co-production process. Jeff Robinov and Ryan Kavanaugh may have announced megadeals, but will they get their money? On a smaller scale, look what just happened to Paramount on their Transformers: Age Of Extinction deal – a Chinese partner (the Pangu Group) changed their minds when they saw the film and it endangered the China release of the movie. Two weeks ago China abruptly scrapped a giant alliance between the world’s three largest container-shipping companies, triggering confusion among Euro entities like Maersk as well as US lines.
…Inhibiting the potentially lucrative co-production process is a long list of “no nos” imposed by Chinese censors. Movies can’t “re-interpret” history, depict the supernatural or display “gratuitous violence.” Those are the official censorship bans. Unofficially, movies can’t depict an American looking smarter than a Chinese character. Bruce Feirstein, the very successful writer of two James Bond films, who has written and produced several co-productions in China, tells me it’s a disastrous mistake for a movie to portray an American leading man who goes to China, does an action scene with, say, Jackie Chan, and then gets the girl. The Chinese girl, that is. “There are 650 million Chinese men who would not like that scene,” he reminds me.
…no vigilante-ism; no civil disobedience; police and military can have guns, but no guns or serious violence by Chinese civilians; no Chinese villains unless they are from Hong Kong or Taiwan; no explicit sex; no Chinese prostitutes. On the genre front: no horror films; no ghosts, no vampires and no werewolves; no religious-based films; no time-travel movies.
And then, of course, there is the simple fact that Chinese real estate is still falling. From the WSJ:
