China's Real Estate Sector Seek for InvestmentChina is seeking overseas investment to boost the massive housing construction in the next century, a Ministry of Construction official said in Beijing Friday.Housing construction is expected to keep an annual growth rate of 15 percent in the 21st century and a large amount of funds will be needed, said Liang Xiaoqing, deputy director of the ministry's Housing Industrialization Promotion Center. China will build at least 1.5 billion square meters of housing in urban areas and 3.5 billion square meters of housing in rural areas, and renovate 2.9 billion square meters of old houses by the year 2005, Liang said. This will provide a big market for overseas businesspeople to invest in China's real estate sector, said the official at the 2000 China Housing and Real Estate Financing Symposium held in Beijing . The Chinese government has formulated a series of preferential policies for overseas real estate developers, including exemption from investment regulatory taxes, easy access to raising of funds, and the freedom to remit their after-tax profits abroad. She said that with the implementation of the government's new housing reform policy, construction of ordinary residential housing has become the focus of investment in the real estate sector. Statistics show that more than 5,000 overseas real estate developers are operating in the Chinese mainland, accounting for 20 percent of the country's real estate enterprises. |
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