Home prices in China’s biggest cities stabilise under Beijing’s stimulus measures

However, it would be some time before the country’s significant property sector saw a strong recovery, because developers still had a large inventory to clear, analysts said.

Last month, prices of newly built homes in the mainland’s 70 major cities edged down 0.08 per cent from November, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Friday. It was the first time in a year and a half that home prices in China stayed nearly unchanged, amid a property slump that wiped out an estimated US$18 trillion of Chinese household wealth since 2021.

In the four top-tier cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen – prices rose 0.2 per cent month on month.

“Reduced mortgage rates and lower thresholds for non-local residents to buy flats in the most developed cities fuelled homebuying interest,” said Zhu Xinhai, a sales manager with Shanghai-based 5i5j Real Estate Brokerage. “A release of pent-up housing demand turned out to be the major driving force in late 2024.”

December was the fourth straight month that the decline in home prices in the 70 cities narrowed, after the central government and local authorities rolled out a series of incentives to bail out the embattled real estate industry.