Lending a hand [By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn]

China's housing market is recovering, but unevenly. First-tier cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, have seen a real estate boom in the first two months of the year, with housing inventory dropping after the government issued a series of policies aimed at clearing the property glut across the country.

New home prices in January increased about 52.7 percent year-on-year in Shenzhen, followed by Shanghai (21.4 percent) and Beijing (11.3 percent), according to a recent report of the National Bureau of Statistics. In many third- and fourth-tier cities, however, a notable overhang of unsold houses continues to limit the expected increase in housing prices.

It is inappropriate to overstate the supply glut, though, because different methods can be used to measure the country's commercial housing inventory.

China has less than 720 million square meters of unsold commercial residential buildings that have finished construction.

The total undeveloped real estate land, on the other hand, is more than 366 million sq m, which roughly equals 1 billion sq m of commercial housing. The designed buildings, if all of them finish construction, could be sold in 10 months or so.

Among all the indexes, the 720 million sq m of commercial residential buildings should best describe China's unsold housing inventory-housing units that are complete. Vacant houses and apartments, therefore, can be deemed as redundancies, not as part of the inventory.

In fact, it is usually "non-existing" homes-those under construction which most urban Chinese families are inclined to purchase. Besides, the real estate market differs from city to city, meaning that what is going on in the country's real estate market can hardly be summarized in a few statements.