Sunac’s theme park deal is a land grab, not a compliment to Mickey Mouse. Much has happened in the two weeks since the developer announced it would buy a slew of stakes from rival Dalian Wanda. On Tuesday, Sunac said that it would raise HK$4.03bn ($516m) from a share sale to “optimise the capital structure”. This will do little to restrain soaring debt. But nor is it a sign of distress.

Sunac is a home builder. It needs land to build on. Project acquisitions are an important source of growth, given that the Chinese government started tightening the supply of housing in 2014. New land sales dropped by a third in the subsequent two years, according to Citi. The measures were successful: The average time of stock in inventory declined from 25 to nine months in key cities as a result.

The theme parks come with a land bank of roughly 50m square meters, a 70 per cent boost to Sunac’s sellable area before the deal. A third developer, Guangzhou R&F will buy the hotels that were part of the initial deal — they do not come with land to sell. In this latest iteration of the deal, Sunac pays Rmb43bn ($6.5bn) and takes on Rmb15bn in net debt. That adds up to a price tag of Rmb1,200 per square metre. Finished projects sell to home buyers at multiples of that.