(Yicai Global) May 28 -- Shenzhen’s housing price-to-income ratio, which measures the affordability of property for the average resident, remains the highest in China at 20.7, according to a recent survey.

This means than an ordinary household needs 27 years to buy a house in Shenzhen if they do not eat or drink, according to a survey released by the Beike Real Estate Research Institute yesterday.

Beijing and Shanghai followed Shenzhen in the rankings with scores also above 20, the report said. Guangzhou, another of China’s four first-tier cities, came seventh with a score of 14.64.

Real estate prices in the hi-tech metropolis of Shenzhen, which neighbors Hong Kong, are now higher than in Beijing and Shanghai. The price of a pre-owned property jumped 16 percent in February from the same period a year earlier, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

Shenzhen has attracted a big influx of talent from other parts of the country, yet there is only a limited supply of residential land, driving up property prices, Chen Xiao, an analyst at Zhuge Housing, said earlier.

Shenzhen’s population has swelled 68.47 percent over the past ten years, equivalent to 7,136,500 newcomers, according to the seventh national census conducted last year. Yet the city only put 1.24 million apartments up for sale in the eighteen years between 2002 and 2019, based on Yicai Global calculations of an average of 80 square meters per apartment.

Sanya, a popular tourism destination in the island getaway province of Hainan, is the hardest city to find a house to rent, according to the survey. Its rent-to-income ratio is 46.58 percent, higher than Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. In general, rent needs to stay below 30 percent, or under a third of a person’s earnings, to be at an acceptable level.

Editor: Kim Taylor