HONG KONG, Aug 3 – Several Chinese developers are planning to raise billions of dollars by listing on the Hong Kong bourse to take advantage of a strong rebound in the housing market, a report said Monday.
The plans come as the southern Chinese city\’s Hang Seng Index has registered massive gains over the past few months, while a resurgent real estate sector on the mainland has boosted hopes of a recovery soon.
Evergrande Real Estate of Guangzhou hoped to raise a billion US dollars in an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong by the end of the year after aborting in March 2008 due to a property market crash, the South China Morning Post said.
It added that Evergrande had recently taken potential investors on tours of its building sites in central and southern China.
Glorious Property Holdings, which owns land along the upscale Bund in Shanghai, also aims to raise a billion US dollars, investment bankers familiar with the plan told the newspaper.
And Shenzhen\’s Fantasia Group was set to launch a 500 million-dollar share sale for its mid-to-high-end development projects in the Pearl River Delta, according to the paper.
The three developers were among a dozen in the pipeline to list in Hong Kong, the Post said.
House prices in 70 large and medium-sized Chinese cities were up 0.8 percent in June from May, rising for the fourth straight month, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
Real estate investment nationwide rose by 9.9 percent in the first half of this year, compared with the same period last year, the statistics showed.
But the rebound was sounding alarms amid reports that Chinese authorities will tighten lending policies to cool growth and avoid a bubble in the property market.
A commentary from the state-run Xinhua news agency last week said the recent boom defied the sensible picture and accused low-level governments of artificially pushing up property prices.
