Chinese Housing Sales, Development Slump in First 10 Months

By Zhang Shidong

Nov. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Home sales in China dropped in the first 10 months of the year and property developers bought less land, the government said, adding to evidence of a slowdown in the nation's real-estate market.

The area of housing sold, measured by floor space, fell 16.5 percent through October to 450 million square meters (4.8 billion square feet) from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said in a statement on its Web site yesterday. The value of housing sales dropped 17.4 percent to 1.76 trillion yuan ($258 billion).

Demand for property is falling due to government policies introduced earlier this year to curb surging prices and because of concerns the world's fourth-biggest economy is slowing. House prices increased 1.6 percent in October from a year earlier, the slowest pace in more than three years, the country's top economic planning agency said on Nov. 11.

Builders purchased 300 million square meters of land from January to October, down 5.6 percent from a year earlier, the bureau said in a on its Web site yesterday.

The amount of land they developed fell 2.5 percent to 190 million square meters, it said, without giving growth rates for the same period last year.

Investment in real estate increased 24.6 percent to 2.39 trillion yuan, down 1.9 percentage points from the January- September period, the bureau said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Zhang Shidong in Shanghai at szhang5@bloomberg.net.