China's 1.4 Billion People Couldn't Fill All Vacant Homes, Former Official Admits

In a rare public critique of China's crisis-hit property market, a former official acknowledged that even China's population of 1.4 billion would not be sufficient to occupy all the unoccupied apartments scattered across the country, as reported by CNN Business.

The combined floor area of unsold homes totaled 648 million square meters (7 billion square feet).

China's property sector, which was once the backbone of the economy, has been in decline since 2021, when real estate giant China Evergrande Group defaulted on its debt obligations following a crackdown on new borrowing.

Prominent developers like Country Garden Holdings continue to face the risk of default, keeping homebuyer confidence low.

According to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) as of the end of August, the combined floor area of unsold homes totaled 648 million square meters (7 billion square feet).

Reuters calculations, based on an average home size of 90 square meters (970 square feet), suggest that this would be equivalent to 7.2 million homes.

This calculation does not include the numerous residential projects that have been sold but remain unfinished due to financial difficulties or the multiple homes purchased by speculators during the last market upturn in 2016 that remain vacant.

These factors together account for the majority of the unused housing space, according to experts. He Keng, an 81-year-old former deputy head of the statistics bureau, stated, "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. That estimate might be a bit much, but 1.4 billion people probably can't fill them."

He made these remarks at a forum in the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, as reported by the official media outlet China News Service.

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