Immobilier : les arguments à mettre en avant pour défendre votre prix de vente

Les Echos

Soumis à des délais de vente de plus en plus longs et à des marges de négociation en augmentation, les vendeurs sont parfois contraints d’accepter de baisser leur prix. Cinq conseils pour valoriser le bien.

Malgré des délais de vente qui s’allongent, des marges de négociation qui augmentent, les prix de l’immobilier ne s’effondrent pas (voir illustration). Dans leur majorité, les vendeurs n’ont pas encore accepté de baisser leurs prix. Seules les personnes acculées à une vente contrainte consentent à des décotes importantes. « Le vendeur pressé avec une échéance fixée dans le temps aura tendance à faire des concessions et à lâcher plus vite dans la négociation du prix face à l’acheteur », explique Nathalie Naccache, directrice de l’agence Fortis Immo à Paris.

Australia: Mine, all mine

Financial Times

Profiting from Asia’s rise and dependence on mineral exports is hurting competitiveness

Steve Sargent, the head of General Electric’s operations in Australia, says people are often surprised to learn that a nation of 22m is now one of GE’s biggest markets – bigger than China in fact. The secret lies in a resources boom that allows the conglomerate to sell locomotives, turbines and underwater technology for the massive mining and energy projects that abound across the island continent. But it is misleading to see this purely as an Australian success story.

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“Remember it’s not Australians buying what we produce; ultimately it’s 3bn people north-west of here,” he says. “If developing Asia is the growth engine of the global economy then mineral-rich Australia provides the fuel.”

In Depth: Positioning for a Housing Recovery

• ​ PIMCO believes that over the coming years, housing-related assets have the potential to outperform the conservative assumptions embedded in their current market valuations.
• As the uncertainty in the housing market wanes, risk premiums in asset prices may reflect a recovery well before the market fully heals.
• A variety of housing-related investment opportunities may outperform in a housing recovery, while cushioning against risk in an economic downturn.

China Home Prices Fall Most in 19 Months on Curbs

Bloomberg

China’s February home prices posted the biggest decline in 19 months as the government pledged to maintain curbs on property, according to SouFun Holdings Ltd. (SFUN), the nation’s biggest real-estate website owner. Home prices dropped 0.3 percent last month from January, according to SouFun, which began compiling the figures in July 2010 when housing values fell 1.3 percent. Residential prices slid in 72 of 100 cities tracked by the company last month, 12 more than in January, it said in an e-mailed statement today.

Building debt

China Financial Markets – Michael Pettis

Before starting on the subject of debt I wanted to make a quick reference to something sent to me by Charles Horner, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.  I am glad to say that the overinvestment thesis is much more widely acknowledged today than it was even two or three years ago, but one myth, I think, is that most of the overinvestment excesses in China are concentrated in the real estate sector.  I have always argued that it is infrastructure where the most amount of investment has been wasted.

Logements, forêts, vignes : les hôpitaux gèrent mal leur gigantesque patrimoine

Les Echos

Le patrimoine des hôpitaux publics non affecté aux soins vaudrait jusqu’à 11 milliards d’euros. Concentré à Paris et Lyon, il est mal exploité, critique la Cour des comptes. Les établissements doivent aussi rationaliser la politique de logement de leur personnel.

Soixante millions de mètres carrés. C’est l’étendue du gigantesque patrimoine immobilier des 1.200 hôpitaux français.

Why India is Riskier than China

Project Syndicate

Stephen S. Roach, a member of the faculty at Yale University, is Non-Executive Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the author of The Next Asia.

NEW HAVEN – Today, fears are growing that China and India are about to be the next victims of the ongoing global economic carnage. This would have enormous consequences. Asia’s developing and newly industrialized economies grew at an 8.5% average annual rate over 2010-11 – nearly triple the 3% growth elsewhere in the world. If China and India are next to fall, Asia would be at risk, and it would be hard to avoid a global recession.

Analysis: For euro zone, a year of deleveraging dangerously

(Reuters) – With governments laboring under too much debt and banks hobbled by too little capital, 2012 is shaping up as another year of hard slog for Europe’s economy that could yet test the single currency to destruction.

The Netherlands on Thursday became the latest country to report that output shrank in the third quarter, lending credibility to forecasts that the broader euro zone will soon be in recession if it is not already. A generation that gorged on debt is now adjusting to what some are calling the Great Stagnation. Talk of a lost decade, like Japan in the 1990s, no longer seems outlandish. So far so familiar. What worries economists is that the longer the deleveraging of government and bank and household balance sheets drags on, the greater the risk of market or policy accidents.

Asset Class Performance

Systematic Relative Strength – http://systematicrelativestrength.com/2011/12/20/whats-hot-and-not-43/

A quick recap of asset class performance over a couple period of time:

Hedge fund alarm bells are ringing over China

Financial Times – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/517d6668-2a4b-11e1-b7f2-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1h4LLdh9r

The eurozone’s political tarantella may still be roiling global markets but some of the world’s savviest investors are already turning their attention elsewhere. It is not trips to Brussels or Frankfurt that analysts at large, secretive hedge funds are planning in the first few months of 2012, but data-gathering exercises in Shenzen and Guangzhou. The past few weeks have seen China loom large in the nightmares of many hedge fund managers still smarting from a less-than glory-filled 2011. Concerns are rising for the global outlook over the increasingly negative economic signals emanating from the country.

Not liking those odds of a China hard landing

FT Alphaville

A new Nomura report puts the odds at one-in-three of a hard landing in China in the next three years, which they define as four consecutive quarters of sequential GDP growth at 5 per cent or less. It’s a pretty epic paper, with numerous authors, charts, and historical references, so we’ll focus here on their key six reasons why they’re becoming more wary of a hard landing. Before we get into that, though — one interesting point made early in the report is why economists are more optimistic than investors on China; despite a sell-off in Chinese equities and bonds, they point out, the IMF is forecasting 9 per cent growth in 2012 while Consensus Economics’ latest survey came up with 8.5 per cent next year and 8.4 per cent in 2013.

Nomura’s strategists see it like this:

The way we would reconcile this gap is that economists forecast the modal, or most likely, outcome, whereas the financial markets tend to take a weighted-average probability of different possible outcomes. If we apply our baseline and hard-landing probabilities to the market method {(8.5*0.66)+(5.0*0.33)}, it gives a weighted-average GDP growth forecast of at most 7.3% in 2012-14. In other words, like-for-like, our forecasts are probably not that dissimilar to what the market is pricing in – the key will be whether the risk of a hard landing rises or falls going forward (…)

The Smart Money Speaks

Barron’s

Fasten your seat belts! Our Wall Street stars expect the markets to stay volatile, but offer good opportunities for nimble investors.

What makes a successful investor? Lots of things, including a nose for value, a knack for research, a respect for risk, a contrarian streak, and not least, a little luck. Coaching from even more successful investors, like those who graced the stage at Barron’s seventh annual Art of Successful Investing conference, held last Monday in New York, can’t hurt either — and could help. A lot. That, at least, is the theory behind AOSI, which provides a forum for some of the investment world’s smartest stars to share their big-picture views, best investment ideas and well-honed investment strategies with the public.

Five of this year’s conference participants — Felix Zulauf, Fred Hickey, Scott Black, Meryl Witmer and Oscar Schafer — should be familiar faces to Barron’s readers, as they are longstanding members of the Barron’s Roundtable. Stephanie Pomboy, the maven behind MacroMavens, is no stranger to these pages, either. Our 2011 line-up also includes Brian Rogers, who calls the investment shots at T. Rowe Price; Ron Baron (not pictured), who does the same at Baron Capital; Patrick Neal, an options whiz, and Gregory Valliere, who connects the dots between Washington and Wall Street for Potomac Research Group.

 The interviews that follow were adapted from video interviews conducted at AOSI by Barron’s editors Michael Santoli and Kopin Tan. You can find them online at http://www.barrons.com, packed with the same sort of insightful commentary and unique investment advice that follows.

La Chine et le syndrome du château de cartes

Les Echos

Le syndrome du château de cartes est de retour. Après avoir semblé insubmersible à la suite de la crise financière internationale de 2008, l’économie chinoise est à nouveau scrutée avec une inquiétude fiévreuse. Lundi dernier, la Bourse de Shanghai est revenue à sa valorisation de mars 2009, accusant une chute de 17 % depuis le début de l’année. Au point que le fonds souverain chinois CIC a fait savoir qu’il montait - légèrement -au capital des quatre principales banques du pays. Une méthode déjà utilisée en 2008 et 2009 par Pékin pour envoyer un signal positif au marché. La Bourse a rebondi, mais, sur le fond, les interrogations sur l’économie chinoise demeurent. Elles s’articulent autour de deux questions imbriquées, celle de l’impact des mesures prises pour calmer l’inflation, et celle du niveau d’endettement de la Chine. Les autorités chinoises n’ont pas fait les choses à moitié pour ralentir la hausse des prix, en particulier dans l’immobilier. La banque centrale a fortement limité les capacités de crédit des banques. Et des mesures ciblées ont été prises pour diminuer les transactions immobilières. Mesures dont la philosophie était la suivante : oui à l’achat d’une résidence principale, non aux simples placements financiers.

On découvre aujourd’hui que ces politiques ont porté leurs fruits. Le nombre de transactions immobilières commence à baisser. Subitement, c’est la panique. En Bourse, les promoteurs dérapent. Le marché va-t-il s’effondrer ? Tout cela n’était-il qu’une bulle ? En matière bancaire, on scrute de près la ville de Wenzhou, dans la province du Zhejiang. Ce centre industriel est connu pour son marché du crédit sous-terrain. Les 400.000 entreprises de Wenzhou, peu soutenues par les banques, ont largement recours aux prêts informels, émanant de particuliers ou d’entreprises non bancaires, assortis de taux souvent usuriers. Ces dernières semaines, de nombreuses PME auraient fait faillite. On raconte que 90 propriétaires d’usine se sont volatilisés, incapables d’honorer leurs dettes. Le zoom des médias sur ce sujet a poussé le Premier ministre, Wen Jiabao, à se rendre sur place. Il a promis de faire le nécessaire pour que les PME aient un accès normal au crédit. Mais certains analystes craignent que ces dernières soient en train de mourir asphyxiées et que le crédit informel échappe à tout contrôle.

Jim Chanos Says Chinese Banks ‘Deteriorating’ as Government Buys Stock

Bloomberg

Jim Chanos, the hedge-fund manager who’s been betting that Chinese bank stocks will tumble, said a rally spurred by government purchases of the shares hasn’t changed his bearish outlook. The MSCI China Financials Index surged 6 percent today after state-run Central Huijin Investment Ltd. started buying shares in the four biggest Chinese lenders. The gauge of banks, insurers and developers had tumbled as much as 43 percent in 2011 through Oct. 4, sending its price-to-earnings ratio to a record low of 5.6 on concern that slowing economic growth will spur bad debts after a three-year credit boom. “The fact that people are even talking about the government stepping in to shore up the banks, when two months ago people thought there was nothing wrong with the Chinese banks, should tell you just how seriously this situation is deteriorating,” Chanos, founder of New York-based hedge fund Kynikos Associates, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Michael McKee today.

Chanos, who told Bloomberg News last month he was selling short shares in “virtually all of the large banks in China,” said today that the country’s property market is in the “first parts of a very serious pullback” and that he’s also betting against Brazil’s Vale SA (VALE), the world’s largest iron-ore producer, on expectations demand from China will slow. China’s home transactions fell during last week’s public holidays after residential prices posted their first monthly decline in a year, according to Soufun Holdings Ltd. (SFUN), China’s biggest real estate website owner.

China Banks Shunned by Investors Fearing Bust

Bloomberg

The cheapest Chinese bank stocks since 2004 may drop further as the three-year credit boom that created the world’s most profitable lenders shows signs of turning into a bust.

The MSCI China Financials Index sank 24 percent this month, falling more than benchmark bank gauges for Europe, the U.S., Japan and emerging markets. Valuations in China dropped below levels reached during the global financial crisis for the first time last week, even after Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (601398) Ltd. and Bank of China Ltd. (3988) said first-half profits hit a record and analysts raised forecasts for next year.

While banks in the MSCI index reported $104 billion of earnings in the past 12 months, bad loans to local governments, a fading real estate boom and slower economic growth are making some of the most successful investors bearish. Jim Chanos, the short seller who predicted Enron Corp.’s collapse, says Chinese banks will fall below the value of their net assets for the first time since December 2003, from an average premium of about 20 percent. Fund managers at Vontobel Asset Management Inc. and International Value Advisers LLC who beat 99 percent of peers this year are avoiding the stocks.