By Hu Yuanyuan (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-06-05 14:47

According to Nick Loup, managing director of Grosvenor Asia, China's residential price is expected to see an overall increase of 5 to 10 percent this year. Grosvenor is a British property firm with three funds in Asia focusing on the real estate sector of Hong Kong and Japan.

Pre-owned house sales, too, increased 6.8 percent last month. It was 0.7 percentage points higher than that in April. Shenzhen and Beijing are still among the top four cities in terms of price hike, with a growth rate of 13.9 percent and 9.7 percent, respectively.

"We expect the price rise to accelerate in the next few months, a usually hot season for property transactions," said a trader with Homelink, a major real estate service firm.

Investment in Shanghai's property market reached 50.4 billion yuan ($6.46 billion) in the first five months of this year, up 11.2 percent year-on-year.

The growth rate of investment in Beijing's property market, however, fell in May, according to Beijing Statistics Bureau. About 53.3 billion yuan was poured into real estate projects from January to May, with the growth rate being 0.8 percentage points lower than that in January-April.

According to the latest statistics, transactions in the Shanghai housing market in May hit a two-year high even after the central and local governments had introduced new policies to bring down the skyrocketing prices.

A total of 2.66 million sqm and 21,848 apartments were sold in May, up 34 percent and 31 percent, respectively over April.

   1 2   

   1 2