China Real Estate Market Losing Steam

BEIJING, July 28 (Xinhua) -- The growth of China's real estate market is decelerating as vacancies grow and sales decline.

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) predicted today that this downward trend will dominate the real estate market for the next few months.

In a NBS report released today, the real estate index, which is an indicator of the industry's health, dropped by 1.57 points from May to 102.21 points in June, 0.73 points lower than one year ago.
This was the first time in the past 16 months that the index dropped below the level of one year ago.

The NBS report shows that excess housing reached 68.86 million square meters by the end of June, increasing 22.6 percent over one year ago. The growth rate of excess was 5.1 percentage points higher than in the first quarter.

China sold 29 million square meters of housing over the past six months, with the half-year growth rate of sales dropping by 9. 5 percentage points over the first quarter.

Since a large quantity of lower-priced housing for low-income people entered the market over the past six months, the average housing price has dropped to around 2,000 yuan per square meter.