Nation's rental market expected to see solid growth by 2022

As many as 750,000 new rental apartments will pop up in China's major six cities by the end of 2022, pushed on by favorable demographics, rising barriers to home ownership, supportive policies and an influx of capital, according to a new study.

The report, titled Opportunity knocks: The rise of China's rental housing market and released by property consultancy JLL this week, looked at the rental housing markets in six major Chinese cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou in Guangdong province, Hangzhou in Zhejiang province and Chengdu in Sichuan province.

Despite the cities having a collective population of around 88 million people, the group had just 135,000 rental units between them, as of the first half of 2018.