According to recent data from China real estate website, Soufun.com, the nation’s home prices slid for the fourth straight month in December as the government made clear that it has no immediate plans to relax its controls on the property market.
In an emailed statement on January 4th, Soufun pointed out that residential prices dropped 0.25 percent in December from the previous month. And this decline was representative of the trend across the nation as prices slid in 60 out of 100 cities tracked by the company, including all of the country’s 10 biggest cities such as Shanghai and Beijing.
However, the final data for the month did not see the drastic price decreases that many had foreseen for the year end. This sign of market durability should reinforce the idea that the government restrictions will be kept in place throughout 2012. According to a recent story in Bloomberg,
“Home prices extended the downward falling tendency, but didn’t fall aggressively, because many developers have already achieved sales targets,” said Peter Bai Hongwei, a Beijing- based property analyst at China International Capital Corp., the country’s biggest investment bank. “Property is likely to be the last sector that the government will relax policies this year.”
So with no signs of the much rumoured hard-landing showing up so far, it seems that while the government is ready to relax lending controls to support trade and other sectors, it is determined to keep property prices down.
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