BEIJING (Reuters) -China’s new home prices fell again in July, dropping 0.3% on month, but declines eased slightly in major cities as more local governments rolled out incentives for homebuyers, though further support is still needed.<\/p>\n
The month-on-month decline was calculated by Reuters, based on data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Friday. In June, prices fell 0.3%.<\/p>\n
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China’s property market has been stuck in a severe slump for more than four years, with declining prices, sales, new investment and construction starts weighing on economic growth. Analysts are unsure when conditions will bottom out.<\/p>\n
“Given the high exposure of Chinese households to real estate, establishing a trough on prices is one of the most important factors to restoring confidence and generating a sustained consumption recovery,” ING said in a note to clients.<\/p>\n
Reviving the real estate sector, which in its heyday accounted for a quarter of China’s economic activity, is a key task for policymakers as they strive to meet the country’s annual GDP growth target of “around 5%” amid domestic and external headwinds.<\/p>\n
Of the 70 cities surveyed, 60 reported month-on-month declines, with the pace of falls slightly narrowing in tier-one cities.<\/p>\n
On an annual basis, new home prices fell 2.8% in July, versus a 3.2% drop in June.<\/p>\n
Notably, year-on-year declines are narrowing modestly across tier-one, tier-two, and tier-three cities.<\/p>\n
“A clear turnaround and stabilisation are not yet in sight. The government should roll out a full set of property-market stabilisation measures without delay,” said Li Kai, founding partner and chief investment officer of Beijing Shengao Fund Management Co.<\/p>\n
A sustained recovery in the housing market has remained elusive despite multiple rounds of policies to stimulate demand and help qualified developers with their liquidity shortages.<\/p>\n
Resale home prices fell further year-on-year and month-on-month in July, with the declines narrowing in tier-two and tier-three cities but widening in tier-one cities.<\/p>\n
Separate data showed China’s property investment fell 12% year-on-year in January-July and property sales by floor area fell 4.0%.<\/p>\n
“Urban renewal initiatives and large-scale public housing procurement could help establish a stable baseline for the sector, provided these policies are executed effectively,” said said Yuhan Zhang, Principal Economist at The Conference Board’s China Center.<\/p>\n
“Nonetheless, private market recovery is likely to remain uneven, with lower-tier cities facing greater challenges,” he said.<\/p>\n
The central government has in the past few months continued to call for stabilising the property market, signalling further policy support.<\/p>\n
An increasing number of local governments have relaxed rules for people to use their provident funds to pay for home purchases. Some also offered subsidies for buying homes.<\/p>\n
Capital city Beijing in August scrapped curbs for qualified buyers to purchase homes in the city’s suburban areas, though it kept the curbs in place within the fifth ring road, a major expressway around the central area.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Liangping Gao, Yukun Zhang and Ryan Woo; Editing by Sam Holmes and Sonali Paul)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BEIJING (Reuters) -China’s new home prices fell again in July, dropping 0.3% on month, but declines eased slightly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":69841,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[64,63,99,512,55168,164,2420,55167,55169],"class_list":["post-69840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-china","tag-declines","tag-economy","tag-local-governments","tag-major-cities","tag-national-bureau-of-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}