None of China's 70 major cities experienced an increase in home prices last month, according to data from China's National Statistics Bureau.
According to a Bloomberg report, home prices fell in 47 cities and remained unchanged in the other 23. New home prices in the four biggest cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen – fell for a fourth consecutive month.
The data follows a two-year effort by the Chinese government to slow the nation's housing market, which has seen dramatically rising home prices. Government policies including higher down payments and purchasing restrictions have been instituted to prevent a housing bubble similar to the U.S. experience in the past decade.
‘The data wasn't a surprise as the government maintained its property policies, and home prices will continue to fall till at least the later half of the year,’ says Ting Lu, an economist at the Hong Kong office of Merrill Lynch.