China's Urban Property Price UpChina's urban property prices gained slightly in the first quarter of the year, according to a latest survey by the Shanghai Bureau of Statistics sampling 35 large and medium-sized cities.Rental housing rose 5.7 percent over the same period of 2000. Sale prices of houses rallied at 1.9 percent. The transfer prices of land went up 1.4 percent. Active transactions drove up house prices in 80 percent of the sampled cities, with Wuhan leading the rally by a growth of 11.2 percent. The rise in the amount of rent for homes continued in the three months up to March. The rise in rent for homes was 3.8 percentage points higher than that of house sale prices and 4.3 percentage points higher than that of land transactions. Most of the sampled cities reported slight gains in land transaction prices, though land prices remain unchanged in nearly 40 percent of the cities. In Shanghai, China's prospering economic center, 67,300 houses (excluding houses reserved for foreign buyers) were sold in the first three months, up 19.9 percent. |
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