source from：FT
https://www.ft.com/content/d440064a-1f5b-11e7-a454-ab04428977f9
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Beijing bans property ads touting high returns and good feng shui

Chinese capital clamps down on agents’ claims as it battles ballooning housing market
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YESTERDAY by: Yuan Yang in Beijing
Beijing’s city government has told property websites to take down advertisements promising investment returns or even good feng shui amid an escalating drive to cool prices in the capital’s bubbling housing market.

Sites have until midnight on Thursday to delete ads saying a home will rise in value, or mentioning “feng shui and other feudal superstitions”.

Chinese officials have warned in recent months of the risk of bubbles developing in the world’s biggest property market, where prices rose roughly 30 per cent last year in top cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. As a result, local governments launched a slew of restrictions on house purchases last October.

But a surprise surge in property sales since the start of the year has led analysts to warn that a bubble could still be looming.

“Policymakers are still worried,” said Jonas Short, head of the Beijing office of NSBO China, an investment bank. “Beijing is the bellwether for property policy, so the fresh attempts to tighten the market suggest other areas will follow suit.”

Although Beijing’s market has been flat for the past four months, prices of residential housing were still up 24 per cent year-on-year in February, the latest month for which data are available.

Over the country as a whole, the total value of residential housing sold rose 26 per cent in January and February compared with the same two months last year.

The crackdown on overzealous advertising follows a series of policies from the Beijing city government over the past month. Of these, an increase in mortgage rates will have the most significant impact on the market, according to Mr Short.

Estate agents have also been warned not to offer buyers ways of getting around purchase restrictions. State television interviewed one Shanghai agent who had married (and later divorced) four clients so they could obtain a Shanghai household registration document, or hukou, making it easier for them to buy houses in the city.

On Monday, the Beijing city government put an end to the practice of using “corridor houses” — uninhabitable apartments the size of garden sheds — to get children into Beijing schools. Such houses were bought purely to obtain the housing certificate required to enrol children without a Beijing hukou into local schools, or as investments to be sold on.

Agents have been warned not to promise to get clients’ children into local schools.

Local governments have long battled unscrupulous agents in China’s fast-moving property market. Last September the Shanghai police detained seven people for spreading false rumours that more tightening measures would soon come — a way of getting panicked buyers to snap up houses in those areas.