China’s property market stabilizes in December

Source: Xinhua | 2017-01-19

HOME prices in China's first and second-tier cities continued to stabilize in December, further signs of cooling in the domestic housing market, the National Bureau of Statistics said today.

The average new home prices remained unchanged last month in first-tier cities and gained 0.2 percent in second-tier ones, down from a growth of 0.1 percent and 0.4 percent, respectively, in November, according to the bureau, which monitors housing prices in new and pre-occupied markets across 70 major cities.

In tertiary cities, new home prices climbed 0.4 percent from a month earlier, decelerating from an increase of 0.8 percent, the bureau's data showed.

"Generally speaking, we've seen continually positive changes in the country's residential sales market in December," said Liu Jianwei, the bureau's senior statistician. "Varied tightening policies implemented in 15 first and second-tier cities seemed to be very effective to curb rapid growth in new home prices with 12 of them seeing month-over-month drops of between 0.1 and 0.4 percent in December."

New home prices in Tianjin and Hangzhou remained flat last month while Guangzhou was the only one out of the 15 cities to record a month-on-month rise of 0.7 percent, slowing from its 0.9 percent gain in November, 1.3 percent increase in October and 3.1 percent rise in September.

New residential prices in the rest first-tier cities, namely Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, fell 0.1 percent, 0.2 percent and 0.4 percent, respectively, from a month earlier, according to the bureau's data.

Similar trends also showed up on a year-on-year basis.

Prices of new and pre-owned houses in first-tier cities both recorded slower growth for the third consecutive month while in second-tier ones, the average price of new homes finally started to fall from a year earlier while slower annual price growth continued to be registered in the pre-owned housing market.

To combat fast-rising home prices mainly in first and second-tier cities, local governments around the country began to introduce tough rein-in policies since late September to curb demand through measures including stricter home purchase restrictions and higher down payment requirement.

"Looking forward, home prices in major Chinese cities, particularly the 20 largest ones, are expected to remain stable in 2017 as I could see no big room for loosened policies," Eva Lee, head of China Real Estate Research at UBS, told a recent press conference held last week in the city by the global financial services provider.