Home sales in Beijing slow under govt's tightening policies

Sales of new apartment units dropped in Beijing in the first two months this year, showing the first signs that the city's red-hot property market is cooling under the government's latest tightening policies, official statistics released Tuesday show.
New residential apartment units sold in Beijing over the January-February period totaled 1.32 million square meters, down 21.1 percent from the same period last year, data released by the Beijing Municipal Statistics Bureau show.
The data, however, did not indicate if housing prices had started to drop.
Beijing rolled out the toughest measures yet on Feb. 16, prohibiting home purchases by families not registered locally, who have no proof of social security contributions or income tax payment in the Chinese capital for five straight years.
The new policies also prohibit new home purchases by Beijing families who own two or more apartments and non-Beijing registered families who own at least one apartment.
China's property market took off in 1998 after the government scrapped a decades-old policy of providing free housing for all state enterprise employees.
Housing prices in major cities soared out of control in recent years and have become a prime source of public complaints, especially in the Chinese capital.
In Beijing, one square meter in a new apartment sold for an average of 20,000 yuan last year. But the square meter price for apartments within the Fourth Ring Road, the city's central urban area, exceeded 34,000 yuan (about 5,151 U.S. dollars), more than 10 times the monthly income of an average Beijing resident.
The average price of housing sold by 30 major real estate companies in China stood at 10,286.42 yuan per square meter in 2010, up 23.98 percent year on year.
Top officials have repeatedly vowed to clamp down on rising home prices. Aside from purchasing limits, the government will boost efforts to build affordable housing to ease the nerves of the middle- and low-income families this year, officials said.
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