China’s home prices fell last month in more than half of the 70 cities monitored by the government, with only three cities recording gains as the country maintained curbs on the property market.
Prices fell in 45 cities last month compared with January, while 22 cities were unchanged, the National Statistics Bureau said in a statement on its Web site yesterday. That compares with 47 cities recording a decline in January. New home prices in the cities of Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou dropped for a fifth month.
Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) said last week China’s home prices remain far from a reasonable level and he called on the government to continue efforts to regulate the housing sector. Relaxing the curbs could cause “chaos” in the market, Wen said. China’s two-year campaign to rein in home prices has included measures such as higher down payments and mortgage rates, and home purchase restrictions in 40 cities.
“With more supply coming in spring, prices will fall further,” said Lan Shen, a Shanghai-based economist at Standard Chartered PLC. “There will not be a total reversal of the government’s tightening policies this year and any sort of policy fine-tuning will have a limited impact on the market.”
Only the northern city of Baotou, the eastern city of Jinan and northwestern city of Xining posted gains of 0.1 percent in home prices. In January, no city posted gains for the first time since the government began releasing data at the start of last year for the 70 cities, instead of a national average.
Among major cities, new home prices in Beijing fell 0.1 percent last month from January, while prices dropped by 0.2 percent in Shanghai. The southern business hubs of Guangzhou and Shenzhen both declined by 0.2 percent.
The eastern city of Wenzhou posted the biggest drop for the fourth month, with home prices declining by 0.5 percent from January and 8 percent from last year, according to the statistics bureau. A credit squeeze on smaller businesses in the city prompted Premier Wen to visit in October and pledge financial aid.
Today’s figures came after private data also showed the housing market continued to cool. China’s home prices last month posted the biggest decline in 19 months, according to SouFun Holdings Ltd, the nation’s biggest real-estate Web site owner.
New home prices fell in 27 out of 70 cities last month from a year earlier, government data showed yesterday.
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