More evidence yesterday that China’s buoyant housing sector is losing some of its bounce.
The country’s National Statistics Bureau revealed that new house price gains hit their slowest rate in more than a year in August.
The slowdown was driven by slowing price growth (and a couple of falls) in top-tier cities.
The cost of new housing in China’s 70 major cities grew 8.3% in August, down from the 9.7% rate in July according to a weighted average from Reuters based on data from the Bureau of Statistics.
House prices rose 0.2% in August from July, slowing from the 0.4% rate seen in July from June.
It was the ninth month in a row of slowing growth from a peak of 12.6% in November 2016 as well as the slowest rate of growth since July of that year.
In year-on-year terms prices rose in all but two of the 70 cities surveyed last month, with only Shenzhen and Chengdu marking contraction of 1.9% and 0.3% compared to the previous year.
Price growth in Beijing slowed 3.7 percentage points for a rise of 5.2%, while prices in Shanghai rose just 2.8%, down a large 4.5 percentage points from July’s pace.
August also saw month-on-month price falls in 18 cities, double the number that saw prices dip in July.
Among the worst hit were Guangzhou (down 0.7%) and Shenzhen and Chengdu (both down 0.4%). Six cities including Beijing and Shanghai saw no price change from a month prior.
Data out last Thursday showed that China’s housing sales growth in August was the slowest in over two years, though developers kept building at a steady rate.
Housing sales by value in August rose 3.8% from a year earlier.
That compared with a 4.3% rise in July, and was the smallest increase since a contraction in March 2015.
For the first eight months of the year, housing sales rose 14.2% from a year earlier, compared with a 15.9% increase from January through July.
