Meanwhile there was another slightly contradictory report on Chinese house prices yesterday.
For yet another month there was signs of a slowing in price growth in some of the larger cities, but other signs that prices were accelerating in medium and smaller cities among the 70 reported on each month.
The cost of new housing across 70 major cities rose 10.7% in April year on year, based on a weighted average from Reuters using data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
Now that was the fifth month in a row that saw a deceleration of prices from the high of 12.6% last November.
But short-term price trends rose further, with average housing prices up 0.7% month on month in April, a smaller rise than was seen in March, but still the fastest rate since October’s 1.1%.
In month-on-month terms, average prices rose in 62 out of 70 cities and fell in 8, the same as in March.
In year-on-year terms April saw prices rise in 69 cities and fall in one, compared to falls in two cities in March.
The biggest urban centres saw growth soften further, according to a data table on top-tier cities’ price trends issued by the bureau.
Month-on-month price trends in those cities eased from a rise of 0.3% in March to growth of just 0.1% in April. Many of these major cities, such as Shanghai and Beijing have seen local governments introduce a series of measures aimed at tightening ownership rules and restricting who can buy second and subsequent houses.
In year-on-year terms price growth slowed as well, but but nowhere near the same level as month to month in most major cities. Beijing’s new home prices grew 17.4% year on year, down from April’s 20.6% rate, for example.
Taken as a whole the latest data suggests that demand for housing is now impacting more strongly in mid and lower tier cities as the crackdown in the major cities has a more noticeable impact.
Early this week there was a similar story from the urban investment data applying to housing.
The figures showed real estate investment rose at the fastest rate in more than two years in April despite increasingly sluggish sales growth. Investment in real estate development for the January-April period rose 9.3% compared to the first four months of 2016, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
That’s the fastest pace for the year so far as well as the quickest clip in year-to-date growth since February 2015.
New housing purchased in the first four months of 2017 came to 416.6 billion square meters, a year-on-year rise of 15.7% that was 3.8 percentage points slower from the annual pace in the year ended March.
In value terms sales totalled Rmb3.3tn ($US478.2bn), up 20.1% from the same period in 2016 but down 5 percentage points from the March figure – underlining the conflicting messages coming from the Chinese real estate (especially housing) sector.
