Residents take a rest at a residential community in Boao, south China's Hainan Province, Feb. 16, 2011. (Xinhua/Meng Zhongde)
China's statistics agency said Friday that under its readjusted calculation system, prices of new properties in the nation's major 70 cities continued to rise in January.
Ten of the 70 surveyed cities reported increases of more than a 10 percent from a year ago, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on its website.
Six cities saw second-hand home prices also up by at least 10 percent. Prices in only two cities fell while those in the other 68 cities rose.
The new calculation system did not include the national property price index as it failed to reflect sharp price gaps among different localities and could lead to misunderstandings, said the NBS online statement.
The agency also has adjusted its data collection system, compiling figures based on transactions records from city-level housing departments, instead of data reported by real estate developers and sellers.
The statistical reform is in response to the agency's failure to accurately reflect skyrocketing home prices. Its figures showed home prices only edged up 1.5 percent on average in 2009.
New home prices in Beijing rose 6.8 percent year on year in January, and those in Shanghai jumped 1.5 percent, while Chongqing's went up 7.9 percent, it said.
Prices in Haikou, capital of the southernmost Hainan Province, saw the sharpest hikes, up 21.6 percent from a year ago. That was followed by the city of Sanya, also in Hainan, where prices rose 19.9 percent, indicating the resort island remains a hot spot for property speculation.
Only Quanzhou city in south China's Fujian Province and the city of Nanchong in the southwest Sichuan Province saw prices fall slightly.
The government has been stepping up measures to rein in soaring housing prices, which have become a major source of public complaints in China's biggest cities. But property prices have remained stubbornly high.
The central government last month raised the minimum down-payment for second home purchases from 50 percent to 60 percent of the property's value and approved the launch of property taxes in Shanghai and Chongqing.
The Beijing Municipal Government on Wednesday announced new rules prohibiting new home purchases by Beijing families who own two or more apartments and non-Beijing registered families who own at least one apartment.
Yang Hongxu, an analyst with the Shanghai-based Eeju property research institute, said sales in Shanghai were expected to be rather gloomy in February and March, and the prices would drop in the second quarter from a year ago.
According to data provided by the Centraline Property, a leading real estate agency, February's second-hand house sales in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Tianjin only accounted for 20 percent of the sales in the same period in January.
As tougher regulations are due for major cities, home buyers are focusing on second and third-tier cities. In January, prices in Yueyang city, in the central Hunan Province, rose 14.2 percent, and those in the northeast border city of Dandong climbed 12.3 percent.
According to central government guidelines, other major cities will issue purchase limit rules in line with central government regulations.
The government also looked to increase the supply of affordable housing and has pledged to provide at least 100,000 affordable apartments and give housing subsidies to 20,000 low-income families this year. Low and medium-income families can start applying for about 10,000 low-rent apartments at the end of the year.
The China International Capital Corporation Limited, a Beijing-based investment bank, expected home sales in 2011 to drop 10 percent in terms of floor space, with first-tier city sales falling by one third, and that in the second-tier city sales down by 25 percent.
The construction site of a residential community is seen in Dalian, northeast China's Liaoning Province, Feb. 18, 2011. (Xinhua/Liu Debin)
Home buyers stand in front of a scale model of a residential community at the sales office of a property project in Qionghai, south China's Hainan Province, Feb. 5, 2011. (Xinhua/Meng Zhongde)
