ABOUT 1.73 million square meters of villas, including stand-alone homes and townhouses, were sold in Shanghai last year, with Pudong New Area registering the largest volume, an industry report showed yesterday.

Among the 7,625 new villas sold last year, 2,016 units were in Pudong, followed by Songjiang, Qingpu, Baoshan and Jiading districts. These five districts contributed a combined 75 percent of the city's entire villa sales, according to real estate portal Soufun.com.

Month by month, December witnessed the largest volume when 1,300 units were sold, followed by September with 1,045 units and 991 units in April, according to Soufun.

Villas across the city sold for nearly 30,000 yuan (US$4,524) per square meter on average last year, with 275 units securing more than 70,000 yuan per square meter, Soufun said.

"The local villa market remained quite stable in terms of price during 2010 - averaging from 24,849 yuan to 34,237 yuan per square meter between January and December," said Lu Yiping, a Soufun analyst. "Compared with apartments, villa projects are somewhat less vulnerable to policy changes since prices are primarily determined by the quality of the development."

Sales of new homes, consisting of both villas and apartments, plunged across the country last year due to two rounds of tightening policies from the central government to rein in property speculation.

In 2009, a total of 3.25 million square meters of new villas, or 13,733 units, were sold in Shanghai, according to China Real Estate Information Corp.