Cranes are seen at a construction site of a housing complex in Beijing on Thursday. Photo: VCG

Overall housing prices in China in November remained stable but the growth has been slowing down with the housing prices continuously falling, while the domestic development investment in the property sector from January to November grew by 6 percent, newly released data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed. 

Fu Linghui, a spokesperson from the NBS, said at a press briefing on Wednesday that the real estate sector remained stable, and that sales of commercial properties and investment had kept increasing but at a slower pace, emphasizing that there were many factors pointing towards the stable development of the sector. 

China's property investment in the first 11 months of 2021 reached 13.73 trillion yuan ($2.16 trillion) growing at 6 percent, slowing down from 7.2 percent from the first ten months, data from the NBS revealed on Wednesday,

Fu added that some cities have been affected by multiple factors including population outflow and difficult economic development, meaning downward pressure on the real estate market had increased, while the debt risk of some real estate enterprises that relied on blind expansion of high debt in the early stage had also risen. 

Despite these problems, there are more favorable factors will contribute to the stable development of the real estate industry, according to Fu, noting after the market adjustment; market participants have become more rational while the long-term mechanism has been gradually improved. 

Prices for both new and second-hand homes in most of China's 70 large and medium-sized cities continued to edge down for three consecutive months, while the year-on-year growth also decreased. 

Zhang Dawei, chief analyst with real estate agency Centaline Property, said that as mortgage policies continue to ease, the market is expected to gradually stabilize over the first quarter of 2022, with first- and second-tier cities taking the lead in emerging from the downturn.

Global Times