Home prices expected to fall
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Home buyers who can afford a one-off payment could save 2,000 yuan (293 U.S. dollars) per square meter compared to a typical installment plan, a saleswoman surnamed Yang told Xinhua Tuesday.
"You can save about 80,000 yuan for a one-bedroom flat of 40 square meters," Yang said.
This is equivalent to an 8-percent-off discount for a new flat located in Tongzhou District, outside the fifth eastern ring road in Beijing.
Not only in Beijing, real estate developers in Nanjing, capital of eastern Jiangsu Province, offer discount of 200 yuan per sq m for home buyers who afford one-off payment.
Analysts said this has shown that a string of government measures introduced recently to cool down the real estate market began to impact the market. They expected the measures could give a hard strike on real estate speculation and drag down the home prices.
Soaring home prices
Chinese home buyers have not seen such attractive deals as payment discount in a year, since the property prices began to rapidly climb in April 2009.
Beijing's property market continued to heat up last month with home prices in the capital city surging 12.3 percent from a year earlier, official figures show.
Home prices in Tongzhou have doubled to more than 20,000 yuan per square meter in the past year, driving up average property prices in the capital city.
"But good deals have recently begun to appear in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing and other cities, showing some property developers' eagerness to speed up sales and get investment back, as they fear a home price drop due to recent tightening measures," said Chen Sheng, vice president of the China Index Academy, a private-sector research institute specializing in real estate.
However, providing a one-off payment of about 1 million yuan, or even installment payments, for a one-bedroom flat in the capital city is beyond most college graduates's capacity, despite the 8-percent-off discount.
Many college graduates can only get a monthly salary of around 4,000 yuan in Beijing.
Beijing was not the only city with a double-digit monthly home price increase last month.
Home prices in China's 70 large and medium-sized cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou surged 11.7 percent in March from a year earlier, the biggest monthly increase in nearly five years, the National Bureau of Statistics said on April 14.
