Reuters, Beijing :
China’s home price rises eased for the first time in 14 months in January, the latest sign that the government’s over four-year campaign to rein in property risk may finally be starting to bite.
Average new home prices in China’s 70 major cities rose 9.6 percent in January from a year earlier, easing from the previous month’s 9.9 percent rise, according to Reuters calculations based on data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Monday.
It was the first slowdown in the rate of price increases since November 2012.
House prices in China have surged in the past year but the market began to show signs of losing momentum at the end of 2013 as local governments took further tightening measures at the prompting of a central government worried about the risk of an asset bubble.
“Because of the effects of a series of government measures including tightening curbs in some cities and an increasing supply of affordable housing, the market environment and pricing expectations were relatively stable,” said Liu Jianwei, a senior statistician at the NBS.
“Tightening credit conditions and easing pressures from housing inventories also helped home sales to drop, which in turn eased the home price rises further in some cities,” Liu said in a statement accompanying the data.
