For a sector regularly called “the most important in the universe”, there is a remarkable lack of consensus over the Chinese housing market. Much of the debate boils down to whether China is currently under- or over-supplied with homes.

The absence of any comprehensive data on just how many houses there are in China, has led to wildly divergent views. But, as we will seek to demonstrate in this article, despite the lack of any solid data on the total number of homes in China, it is still possible to present a strong statistical case that the market is currently under-supplied with modern housing.

While data on the housing market is patchy in many areas, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) does publish information on the number of ‘commodity’ houses that the country has. Commodity homes are independent, modern units, built after reforms to establish a private housing market were introduced in the late-1990s. According to the NBS, by the end of 2012 (the most recent year for which data has been published), China had built 60m of these units.