Some Fortune 500 CEOs said soaring housing prices in Beijing are forcing university graduates out of the city. “There is no value in building one of the world’s most desirable cities if working people cannot afford to live in it,” Hubertus von Gruenberg, Chairman of ABB Group, told the Ninth Meeting of the International Business Leaders Advisory Council for the Mayor of Beijing. “To put it in perspective, the average price of housing in Beijing is about USD3,700 per sq m, similar to Tokyo, but the average income in Beijing is less than 10% of Tokyo’s,” he said. While Beijing remains an attractive tourist destination, it is now one of the world’s 10 most expensive cities to live in. In the recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) study, named Cities of Opportunity, the Chinese capital scored near the top in foreign direct investment (FDI) and Fortune 500 headquarters, but housing and city livability were pulling down Beijing’s score. Gruenberg suggested imposing a property tax could be a good choice to curb investment-led demand.

• The Chinese government has issued an urgent notice to governments at all levels to set up and implement new compensation standards for land requisition before July. Local governments are required to pay heed to “reasonable” requirements of people whose homes are to be pulled down, and compensation standards should be strictly followed or raised if they are too low.
• One-third of Chinese billionaires are in the real estate business, according to a report by cuaa.net, an independent Chinese website focusing on alumni affairs. Half of them are concentrated in three major industries: real estate, energy and information technology. China has 1,958 billionaires. Of these, 567 people are in the real estate sector.
• Chinese developer Longfor Properties has seen its contract sales drop by 40% to CNY1.5 billion so far this month from April as buying interest is dampened by central government efforts to cool the market. The developer had no immediate plans to offer discounts to perk up buying interest.