Home prices fall in 54 of 70 cities in May

Residential home prices fell in May for 54 of the 70 cities surveyed by the government, a broader slowdown than April, when home values declined in 46 of the cities, Bloomberg reported. Wenzhou posted a 14% year-on-year fall in prices, and prices in the larger cities of Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai fell by as much as 1.6%. Some analysts saw signs in the data that property values were bottoming out. “China’s property market is approaching gently the bottom of its decline path and I expect we’ll see a touchdown sometime over the next three to four months,” said Peter Churchouse, managing director of the Hong Kong-based property investment fund Portwood Capital. However, others warned that the slowdown in the property market could be starving local governments of revenue, thus encouraging them to circumvent the real estate purchasing restrictions imposed by Beijing.