Poly Real Estate home sales up 46% in Feb

Poly Real Estate Group, China's second largest property developer by market value, said on March 11 that its home sales rose 46.29 percent year-on-year to 3.62 billion yuan ($574.6 million) in February.

Transaction area surged 69.53 percent from one year earlier to 377,900 square meters last month, the developer said in a statement filed to the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

However, weighed down by the government's tightening measures, the group's home sales still slid 30.73 percent year-on-year during the first two months of 2012, while sold floor space slumped 29.84 percent.

The government has imposed a raft of measures since 2010 to curb the excessive growth in home prices, including higher down payments, higher loan rates, a ban on third-home purchases, property-tax trials and the construction of low-income housing.

Prices have seen slower growth as a result of the cooling efforts. In January, home prices in 70 major Chinese cities monitored by the National Bureau of Statistics all saw prices stabilize.

Premier Wen Jiabao said last week that China will continue to regulate the real estate market to bring property prices to a reasonable level.

In a separate statement, the developer said it obtained two plots of land in Xi'an, the capital city of North China's Shaanxi province, last month at a cost of 631 million yuan.