The nation's housing market continued to cool in January as new home prices in 20 cities fell from the previous month, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Wednesday.
Experts said that local governments' home-buying curbs clearly led to the drop in property prices and stabilized the domestic real estate market.
Among the 15 first- and second-tier cities with overheated property markets, new home prices fell on a monthly basis in 11 localities, according to the NBS, which tracks home prices in 70 cities every month. The declines ranged from 0.1 to 0.5 percentage point.
Home prices rose in 45 cities in January, and 46 cities reported housing price gains in late December, the data showed.
Prices were flat in five cites.
New home prices in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province, rose 0.6 percent month-on-month in January, but the pace of growth has fallen for the past four months, Liu Jianwei, a senior NBS statistician, said in a statement.
First-tier cities refer to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong Province.
Yan Yuejin, research director of the Shanghai-based E-house China R&D Institute, attributed home price gains in Guangzhou to the fact that its prices were lower than in other first-tier cities.
Although Guangzhou's housing market seemed more overheated compared with other first-tier cities in January, the gains there were under control, Yan told the Global Times on Wednesday.
"It is possible that the Guangzhou government will roll out restrictions to tighten second home purchases in the future," he said.
Liu also said that housing markets in third-tier cities remained stable in the first month of the year, with new housing prices up 0.4 percent month-on-month, the same gain as the previous month.
The domestic home market has stabilized because of local governments' restrictions on purchases and mortgage terms, and these trends will continue in the first half of 2017, experts forecast.
Housing prices in North China's Tianjin Municipality dipped 0.3 percent month-on-month in January and cities like Wuxi, East China's Jiangsu Province, Fuzhou, capital of East China's Fujian Province and Shenzhen reported evident drops during the same period, according to the NBS data.
Other cities like Sanya, South China's Hainan Province, saw large rises in the first month, which Yan said meant "Sanya's home prices were driven up by increasing demand as home buyers hurried to purchase properties there during the Lunar Spring Festival holidays."
A 30-something woman surnamed Pei from Dalian, Northeast China's Liaoning Province, told the Global Times on Wednesday that she plans to buy a home in Sanya because "winter in Liaoning is cold and my family hopes to spend Spring Festival holidays in a warm city like Sanya, which also has lovely beaches and fresh air.
"I have learned from my agent that a one-bedroom apartment of no more than 50 square meters will cost around 250,000 yuan ($36,337) in the city, and I will go there in March to make a deal," Pei said.
