Property curbing to forge on

China will continue its property control policies and keep a tight reign on the property market, especially in cities where home prices rise for three consecutive months, the country's land authorities said Tuesday.

"Changes have taken place in the land market since November. Due to more quality plots of land being offered, average land prices were driven up in some cities," Liao Yonglin, an official of the Ministry of Land and Resources (MLR), said at a press briefing Tuesday.

"With rising sales volumes of residential homes in some cities, developers have become more active in buying land and as a result home prices show signs of rising," Liao said.

The ministry will keep a close eye on the market in cities where home prices rise for three consecutive months, or where land prices have been abnormally high over the past three months, and urge city governments to balance local land supply with demand to stabilize prices, Liao said.

Meanwhile, more cities saw home prices rise in November from October, data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed Tuesday.

Among 70 major cities monitored by the NBS, 53 saw a month-on-month rise of home prices in November, up from 35 in October.

"Due to increased sales, developers have more cash to invest in new projects, pushing up land costs and eventually home prices," Zhang Haiqing, director of the Centaline Property Research Center in Shanghai, told the Global Times.

The MLR briefing came after the country's policymakers agreed Sunday that it would continue its property market control policies in 2013, at the Central Economic Work Conference which set the keynote for the next year's economic growth.

"Decisions at the Central Economic Work Conference signaled that the central government will not loosen its property control policies despite the economic slowdown this year," Chen Guoqiang, vice-president of the China Real Estate Society, told the Global Times.

"As the economy has begun picking up recently, the likelihood of the government easing its policy is even smaller. If home prices rise too fast next year as the economy recovers, the government will issue stricter measures such as a nationwide implementation of property tax to fight speculation," Chen said.

"The government will unveil more measures to control distribution of government-subsidized housing next year to increase home supply," Zhang from Centaline Property Research Center said.

The country aims to start building around 6 million units of government-subsidized housing next year as a way to stabilize home prices, Jiang Weixin, Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, said in November.