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The real estate unit of Citigroup projects to increase ten times its investment in the real estate market of the Chinese continent, in US$800 millions in the three years to come, declared yesterday a top responsible for the company in Shanghai.

"We will buy all types of properties, understanding offices, details and industrial properties in China", declared Stephen Coyle, strategist in investment in chief in Citigroup Property Investors, at the time of a conference on the real estate finances.

Citigroup spent more US$50 millions last year for a part of 75% in the Novel Plaza, a tower of offices situated to the downtown of Shanghai, in its first movement on the real estate market of the continent.

The company joins some rivals thus as Morgan Stanley and the group Goldman Sachs in the opportunity of investments in the industry of property of the nation, where the demand of offices, stores and houses is pushed by the strong economic growth.

Some observers of the industry assigned the sudden rise of the prices of lodgings in the big cities as Shanghai and Beijing, in part, to the increasing contribution of capital overseas in the real estate sector of the continent.

Lately, the local newspapers speculated on the fact that the authorities will enact new measures aiming funds overseas.

"We expect tighter procedures overseas for the approvals in the investments on the properties, and to restrictions to financing overseas for the local tools of investment used to acquire existing properties" noted My June, an economist of the Deutsche Bank AG, in a note of research, after the Chinese government announced a set of normalization measures May 29.

The measures unveiled last week, including payments of taxes of more elevated deposits on the transactions of lodging, didn’t address the sector of investment overseas.

However, Stanley Chan, director of management of Stanley & Partners Investment Management, noted that the investments overseas on the continent counted last year for only 1.15% of the 1.8 quintillion of yuan (US$225 billions) in the sales of property, and would affect the prices of the lodgings hardly.

Gu Yunchang, vice-president of the association of Real estate Lodging Research in China (Dyed Real Estate Housing Research Association), said that because of the absence of tools of financing as societies of investments real estate, different domestic investors lost the opportunity to put their money in properties of good quality on the continent. The institutional investors acquire overseas therefore first these properties producers of come back, and inject them in Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) to be sold overseas on the financial markets, as Hong Kong and Singapore.