Housing market expected to cool under strict purchasing limits (2)

Song Ding, a specialist in real estate market analysis with China Academy of Comprehensive Development, said that the focus of this round of tightening seems to have shifted from curbing housing speculation to curbing the general demand for apartments.
The goal is to tightly control the amount of capital entering the property market in a bid to prevent bubbles and an ensuing collapse that would destabilize the macro-economy, Song said.
The government previously rolled out a series of tightening measures, but property prices remain high since 2009 in the wake of the global financial crisis as large amounts of speculative capital stayed in the property market.
The National Bureau of Statistics of China last week reported that under its readjusted calculation system, prices of new properties in the country's 70 major cities continued to rise in January.