China's housing price up 12.8% in April

Housing prices rose 12.8 percent in April from a year earlier in China's 70 large and medium-sized cities, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Tuesday. That was 1.1 percentage points higher than March's housing price rise.

Notably, newly-built housing prices in Haikou of Hainan province skyrocketed 64.3 percent year-on-year, followed by Sanya's 58.2 percent and Wenzhou's 26.1 percent.

Prices of existing homes in the major cities advanced 10.5 percent year on year in April, the NBS said.

Sanya, the second largest city in Hainan, saw its existing home sale prices rise 48.8 percent year on year, the most for any city, the statement added.

The large increases came despite central government measures to cool the hot-red property market, including more restrictive down-payment requirements, higher loan rates, a ban on lending for third home purchases and tighter scrutiny of developers' financing.

Local governments have rolled out their own specific measures to stem excessive price gains. Beijing has limited its residents to purchasing one new home, a policy effective from this month.

Yang Hongxu, an analyst from Shanghai-based E-House China Research Development Institute, said although home prices continued to increase strongly, a drop in floor space sold "signaled a clear shift" in market sentiment.

"The property market has a 'wait and see' attitude and now has entered a period of adjustment," Yang said.

In April, floor space sold stood at 80.51 million square meters, a decrease of 1.55 million square meters from March.

Floor space sold in the first four months climbed 32.8 percent from a year earlier to 234 million square meters. Growth in the first four months was down 3 percentage points compared to the first quarter.

Qi Ji, vice minister of housing and urban-rural development, said last week that social reaction to the tightening measures was positive and the measures had curbed excessive home price rises in some cities.

The NBS data showed property developers borrowed 455.2 billion yuan of loans from domestic lenders in the first four months, up 39.9 percent year on year. Bank loans for individual home buyers surged 102.1 percent from a year ago to 295.5 billion yuan from January to April.

Property developers invested 993.2 billion yuan in the market in the first four months, up 36.2 percent year on year, the statement said.

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