Milestones

In 1990, the State Council issued a pilot rule on the remise and transfer of urban land's usage rights. It was seen as the beginning of China's real estate industry.

In 1998, China abandoned the welfare housing system in which State enterprises built houses for employees. Employees only had the usage rights but no ownership. That same year the government set up a housing matching fund system to encourage people to buy their own apartments. Enterprises and employees contributed the same amount of money to the fund.

On October 29, 1998 the country's first 19 low-cost housing projects, including the largest two Tiantongyuan and Huilongguan, made their debut at the Beijing Real Estate Transaction Center.

On July 13, 2001, Beijing won the bid to hold the 29th Olympic Summer Games. In August, a group of 134 real estate speculative investors from Wenzhou, Zhejiang province went to Beijing and inked property deals valued over 100 million yuan.

To rein in runaway property prices, the government launched a new slew of measures to cool down the market in 2005. They included raising mortgage rates for individual home buyers, ensuring the supply of medium and small-sized apartments, curbing speculative buying, and levying taxes on individual property sales made within two years of purchase.

On April 27, 2006, a Shenzhen netizen named Zou Tao embarked on a "No Property Buying" project over the Internet and received more than 20,000 individual online messages of support from 32 major cities.

On July 11, 2006 six ministers issued a notice limiting the entrance of foreign capital into the real estate market and tightening the management on foreign institutions' investment and individual property buying in China.

In 2008 Premier Wen Jiabao said in his work report that the government earmarked 6.8 billion yuan in its 2008 budget to build low-cost housing for the urban poor in the western and central parts of the country. That's 1.7 billion yuan, or 33 percent, more than last year.

(China Daily 09/01/2008 page2)