High-end rental rates likely to increase

The luxury apartment rental market in Beijing looks likely to recover next year after the global economic storm.

Daniel Yin, managing director of CB Richard Ellis Group's Beijing branch, said the rental prices of Beijing's high-end apartments might sink to rock bottom at the start of next year, but he predicted they would start rising again in the second quarter of next year, to hit a growth of between 5 to 10 percent after the middle of the year.

"We can see a big impact from the global financial crisis on Beijing's luxury apartment rentals. Through the first half of this year, multinational companies slowed their pace of sending foreign employees to the Chinese mainland," Yin said yesterday.