China's 1.4 Billion Population Insufficient To Fill It's Empty Homes, Says Former Official In Rare Public Criticism

Notably, China’s real estate sector has plummeted since 2021 when industry giant China Evergrande Group defaulted on it’s debt obligations after a clampdown on new borrowing.

The total floor area of unsold homes in the country stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), as of August end, the data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) indicates.

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Speaking about the slump in China’s property sector, a former official said on Saturday that the country’s whole population of 1.4 billion people would not be sufficient to fill all the empty apartments spread across the nation. The statement came as a rare display of public criticism of China’s real estate sector. 

He Keng, a former deputy head of the statistics bureau, commented on the empty homes lying across the country and said, “How many vacant homes are there now? Each expert gives a very different number, with the most extreme believing the current number of vacant homes are enough for 3 billion people,” as reported by Reuters. 

Speaking at a forum in China’s Dongguan city, the former official expressed an open critique of the condition of the country’s property sector. He said, “That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can't fill them,” according to a video released by the official media China News Service. 

Notably, China’s real estate sector has plummeted since 2021 when industry giant China Evergrande Group defaulted on it’s debt obligations after a clampdown on new borrowing, the report stated. Currently, big names such as Country Garden Holdings are still inching closer to default, leading to a depressed sentiment among home buyers.

The total floor area of unsold homes in the country stood at 648 million square metres (7 billion square feet), as of August end, the data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) indicates. Based on Reuters’ calculations, keeping an average home size at 90 square metres, this number would be equivalent to 7.2 million homes. 

Further, experts project that this data excludes the numerous residential projects that have already been sold out but are yet to be completed owing to cash-flow problems, or the several homes bought by speculators in 2016 during the last market boom which today remain empty, which jointly constitute the bulk of empty space.  

The former official’s comments stand in sharp contrast to the government’s official stance and narrative that the Chinese economy is ‘resilient’. Further, a spokesperson at the foreign ministry in a recent news conference noted, “All sorts of comments predicting the collapse of China's economy keep surfacing every now and then, but what has collapsed is such rhetoric, not China's economy,” the report added.