Statistics
April property prices witness mixed growth
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2011-05-18 13:27
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BEIJING -- Property prices in major Chinese cities showed mixed growth in April, with more cities reporting month-on-month increases in new commercial housing prices from March and lower prices for resold housing units, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
April brought reports of month-on-month price growth for new commercial homes in 56 of the 70 cities currently being surveyed by the NBS, compared to 50 cities reporting month-on-month growth in March.
New home prices declined from a month ago in 9 cities and stood unchanged in 5 cities, while 26 cities posted smaller monthly price gains. All of the cities that witnessed home price hikes posted increases of less than 1 percent, said the NBS.
Just 41 cities reported month-on-month price increases for resold housing units in April, down from 44 in March, according to the NBS.
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Looking at annual figures, three major cities reported year-on-year declines in new commercial home prices last month, up from two in March. A total of 52 cities saw year-on-year growth in new home prices, said the NBS.
Secondhand home prices dropped in 8 cities from one year ago, while 45 cities reported declines in year-on-year price growth from a month ago.
The NBS stopped releasing overall housing prices for 70 major cities in January of this year, citing the fact that overall price figures for these cities failed to reflect regional differences. The NBS is also using a new surveying method to determine price changes.
The Chinese government has repeatedly stressed its efforts to cool the runaway property market and adopted various measures to curb rising property prices, including restricting residents in major cities from buying second or third homes, requiring higher down payment requirements for mortgages and instituting new property taxes in the cities of Chongqing and Shanghai.
In a latest move to tighten real estate credit, China Construction Bank, China's second largest lender, said last week that its branches in the eastern Zhejiang province raised the minimum down payment for first home buyers to 40 percent from the national standard of 30 percent.
Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang and one of the cities that had witnessed the largest home price increases in the past years, was among the three cities that reported year-on-year declines in new home prices last month, with new home prices down 1.2 percent from a year ago in April.
Also, in Sanya in south China's Hainan province, new home prices continued to fall for a second month on an annual basis dropping 0.9 percent from the same period last year.
The government has also introduced a raft of new monetary policies that have raised borrowing costs for developers and tightened liquidity in the market, including bank interest rate hikes and raised bank reserve ratios.
The People's Bank of China (PBOC), the country's central bank, said Wednesday that the growth of property developers' bank settlement accounts in China's hottest property markets has started to decline.
Growth rates of property developers' bank settlement accounts fell significantly in the first quarter of the year in the municipalities of Beijing and Shanghai and provinces of Guangdong and Jiangsu.
Month-on-month growth rates in these areas were lower than the industry's national average level of 4.1 percent for the fourth consecutive quarter, the bank said in a report.
In Beijing, where the municipal government is aiming for a moderate decrease in the prices of new residential housing in 2011, both new home and secondhand home prices rose 0.1 percent in April from the March level, according to the NBS figures.
In Shanghai and Chongqing, where new property taxes have been in place since the start of the year, new home prices were both up 0.3 percent on a monthly basis.
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