CHINA said yesterday that home prices in the country rose 10.5 percent in December compared with the same month a year earlier but the growth rate slowed amid official efforts to cool the boom.
Chinese leaders have imposed curbs to cool the market, worried that runaway spending could ignite a debt crisis and that prices are rising beyond the reach of the country's poor majority, according to the Associated Press.
Despite those measures, prices in December jumped as much as 25 percent in some cities, the country's top planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, said on its Website.
But it said the nationwide growth rate was down 0.6 percentage point from November's growth rate.
Meanwhile, in the first few weeks of 2008 sales of residential property in China's major cities fell drastically, the China Securities Journal has reported.
Cities such as Beijing, Wuhan in Hubei Province and Chongqing saw their housing transactions in the first week of the year drop by more than 20 percent from the previous week, the report said.
Housing transactions in the booming southern city of Shenzhen in Guangdong Province plunged by about 38 percent and sales in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu Province, plummeted by more than 52 percent, it said.
As housing transactions in most cities continued to decline, Wang Shi, chairman of Shenzhen-based Vanke, China's largest real estate developer, recently admitted the "turning point" of China's property market had come, Xinhua news agency reported.
His remarks sparked a furious debate, and some developers blamed him of fanning the wait-and-see attitude among consumers.
Housing prices also fluctuated in various cities with dwindling trading volume. Beijing saw its average housing sales price rise slightly by 1.33 percent in the first week of January, but Shenzhen reported a 3.96-percent slump.
Real estate developers in Beijing were trying to attract more buyers by offering discounts or special "gifts," such as a free parking space or home decorations.
A salesman at Webok International, a new residential development in the bustling Chaoyang District of eastern Beijing, said his company recently cut the sale price of its homes from 24,500 yuan (US$3,297) to 22,000 yuan a square meter.
Other developers also joined in on the price-cutting to promote sales in the city.
Pan Shiyi, head of SOHO China, another major real estate development company, pointed out housing prices would be further curbed in 2008 and 2009 as the government is to offer more economic flats and low-rent housing to middle- and low-income residents.