Home price growth in China's major cities continued to slow in June, with fewer cities recording month-on-month gains, data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed on Monday.
New home prices climbed on a monthly basis in 55 of the 70 large and medium-sized cities tracked in June, compared with 60 in May, according to the NBS. Ten cities saw new home prices decline month-on-month, up from four in the previous month.
Hefei, capital of East China's Anhui Province, posted the sharpest monthly increase of 4.9 percent in June.
Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province, reported a surge of 47.4 percent year-on-year in new home prices, the largest among all first-tier cities. The other first-tier cities - Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou - recorded gains of 33.7 percent, 22.3 percent and 19.4 percent year-on-year, respectively, the NBS data showed.
For secondhand homes, 48 cities posted month-on-month increases and 14 reported falls in June, compared with 49 and 13 respectively in May.
Liu Jianwei, a senior statistician at the NBS, said in a statement on Monday that although month-on-month growth in first-tier cities accelerated in June, second- and third-tier cities continued to see a slowdown in home price gains.
There is a divergence among cities, Nomura said in a note sent to the Global Times on Monday. It said that average home prices in top-tier cities rose 2.1 percent month-on-month in June, up from 1.8 percent in May, while the growth rate in second-tier cities slowed to 1.3 percent from 1.6 percent in May and that for third- and fourth-tier cities together was 0.3 percent, compared with 0.4 percent in May.
Experts generally believe the momentum in home prices is likely to ease further in the second half of this year.
While a stronger-than-expected property rebound in the first half was a key reason for resilient GDP growth, "we continue to expect the rebound to subside and property investment growth to fall in the second half, with sales stabilizing and still-large inventory pressure," Nomura wrote.
The transaction volume for all of 2016 may still be 20 to 30 percent higher than last year, Yan Yuejin, a research director at the Shanghai-based E-house China R&D Institute, told the Global Times in an e-mail on Monday.
"As regards prices, the market will likely see narrowed growth, but a decline is unlikely," Yan noted.
The housing market rallied at the beginning of this year thanks to stimulus measures including a tax cut for property transactions and reductions in the minimum down payment requirements.
