Real estate transactions drop in major chinese cities

Sales of residential housing in Beijing and Shanghai dropped sharply in the past two months due to both the central and local government’s latest measures to cool the property market.

According to the municipal statistics bureau on March 15, residential housing sales in Beijing for the January-to-February period declined 21.1% from the same period last year to 1.32 million square meters. At the same time, residential housing transactions in Shanghai fell 31.3% year-on-year to 1.9 million square meters.

During the first two months, total housing sales including both residential housing and commercial housing projects in Beijing and Shanghai dropped 18.9% and 26.7% from last year, respectively.

In the past two months, newly launched housing projects in Beijing totaled 2 million square meters, a 34.8% decrease from the same period last year. But residential housing construction increased 14.4% year-on-year to 1.8 million square meters.

Source: MarketWatch