The Chinese real estate developers' willingness to open new projects was hit by the government's new round of policies to cool the property market, the Shanghai Securities News reported Friday.

Only 239 residential estate projects were opened in February in 72 large- and medium-sized cities across the country, a decrease of more than 69.8 percent from the previous month, the report said. Nearly 800 new projects were opened in the same cities in January, it added.

According to the report, 15 cities have not released a single new project into the market for the entire month.

A total of 26 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Xiamen, have implemented their own versions of regulations since the State Council announced eight measures to curb rising housing prices in late January.

Yinchuan, the capital city of Ningxia Hui autonomous region in Northwest China, announced that the growth of the city's housing price should be lower than its citizens' average income growth rate, and its year-on-year growth should be lower than 10 percent, the report said. Southwest cities such as Kunming and Guiyang also set their goals for controlling housing prices growth, the newspaper said.

"The Spring Festival season was a slack season for real estate market, but the rigorousness of the government's policies went beyond expectations as well," a property agent in Shanghai told the reporters. The performance of Shanghai's real estate agencies tumbled by 70 to 80 percent in February because of the shrinking turnover volume, it reported.

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Although more properties were expected to be released into the market in March, many developers may would like to sell more homes at lower prices as the supply increasing, the report quoted an analyst from soufun.com as saying.

According to data from soufun.com, 885 residential projects are set to be opened this month.

Meanwhile, China Vanke Co Ltd, the country's biggest listed property developer, also announced sharply lower sales value in February, which declined to 6.08 billion yuan, down by almost 70 percent from the previous month, money.163.com reported Thursday.