Tong Yuezhong, Vice President of the China Real Estate Research Association

　　“The purpose of regulation is to bring excessively high housing prices down.” Taking Beijing's housing prices as an example, he said, “Around 2004, homes near the West Fourth Ring Road in Beijing cost about 6,000 yuan per square meter, yet just a few years later, today, prices have soared to around 40,000 yuan per square meter. Surveys show that currently only 5% of China's population are wealthy individuals with personal assets of more than 10 million yuan. However, if someone had taken out a loan in 2004 to buy two commercial homes near Beijing's West Fourth Ring Road, then today, by selling just one of them, he could not only pay off all the mortgage debt but also join the ranks of the wealthy.”

　　At the same time, when housing prices rise too fast, developers can make money simply by acquiring land, so many developers do not pay much attention to housing quality. As real estate regulation policies continue to be introduced, while housing prices are being curbed, housing quality issues are also increasingly drawing public attention. Promoting housing industrialization is one of the ways to solve the many difficult problems of real estate, and it is also an effective measure for the construction industry to promote low-carbon emission reduction.

　　What is housing industrialization? Tong Yuezhong explained that the United Nations Economic Commission's definition of housing industrialization mainly covers six aspects: continuity of production, standardization of products, integration of the production process, standardization of engineering construction management, mechanization of production, and integration of technological production and scientific research.

　　“The purpose of our advocacy of housing industrialization is to improve labor productivity, ensure quality, reduce costs, conserve resources, shorten construction periods, and reduce labor intensity,” said Tong Yuezhong. Housing industrialization already has too many successful practices abroad, and compared with traditional construction models, its advantages are self-evident. “In Japan, houses are manufactured on production lines; a production line can produce a house every 40 minutes, and people buy houses in housing framework markets just like supermarkets; in Germany, buying a roof is as simple as adding a piece of furniture, and people can configure their homes according to their needs; in the United States, one worker can assemble several houses in a day, and at most there are only a dozen or so people on the entire site, with workers often holding multiple roles, being both drivers and installers.”

　　In China, in addition to the above advantages, the full decoration brought by housing industrialization can also avoid the high energy consumption caused by decorating roughcast houses. According to calculations by the Industry Development Department of the China Building Decoration Association, residential decoration and renovation may produce an average of two tons of waste per household, of which 85% is recyclable and reusable resources; if 20 million households carry out renovation and modification throughout the year, 40 million tons of waste will pollute the environment each year. The problem of secondary decoration is an important factor in China's building energy consumption being higher than the international average. Fully decorated homes built by developers can avoid the waste of these resources.

　　A series of macroeconomic regulation and control policies in China since 2003 have undoubtedly accelerated the process of real estate marketization. The increasing marketization of real estate finance and land supply, and the gradual transition from a seller's market to a buyer's market, have forced real estate enterprises to simultaneously face multiple pressures: broadening financing channels, reducing costs, improving quality, and expanding markets. This pressure, which has only increased and continuously escalated with macroeconomic regulation, is becoming an ever-greater driving force for housing industrialization.

　　Tong Yuezhong believes that housing industrialization is, on the one hand, a change in production methods, with major components and parts able to be produced in factories; more importantly, it is the application of scientific research results. In his view, with industrialized housing production, housing prices will fall rather than rise.

　　China's level of housing industrialization is very backward compared with developed countries. Among the reasons, Tong Yuezhong believes one of the more important is: after China joined the WTO (World Trade Organization), in order to protect Chinese construction enterprises, multiple conditions were set for foreign construction companies, such as the enterprise must be directly invested by foreign investors and the construction technology must be something we do not master at all, in order to restrict their entry into China. Although this protected our industry, it also protected the industry's backwardness. If we truly achieved reform and opening up, China's housing production methods would be able to align with those of developed countries.