Shanghai Daily news

The Shanghai government should adopt further tightening measures to curb the overwhelming consumption in the city's property market besides encouraging housing supply to rise to cool the sector, an industry report said yesterday.
The local government is expected to launch austerity policies such as limiting housing mortgage loans to curb market speculation after the central bank increased its benchmark interest rates last month, the Shanghai Real Estate Index Office said in a monthly property market review yesterday.
"To secure a healthy development of the city's housing market, the government should take proper action to reduce demand to some degree as well as increase supply," the report said.
The office also predicted the central bank will continue to slightly increase its lending rates several times more in a bid to rein in the country's overheated real estate sector.
The benchmark of the city's new apartment prices, the Shanghai Housing Index, climbed 1.4 percent from a month earlier to 1,321 points in October, the office reported yesterday.
The index, which tracks both prices and trading volume, jumped 12.7 percent in the first 10 months of this year, the report said.
Among the 167 housing projects surveyed, only one boasted a more than 10-percent rise in prices while prices for the majority increased between 3 percent and 7 percent, which is slower than those of last month, the office said without giving more details.
"The city's new apartment prices will keep going up this year, but at a relatively slower pace," said Zhu Huiping, director of Shanghai Shenyang Property Agency.
"More stringent rules governing land leasing and mortgage are expected to help limit the growth rate."
Based on the statistics for the first three quarters, the office forecast the city's average housing prices to rise 15 percent this year, compared with 33 percent last year.
However, the growth will be still faster than the government target.
At the beginning of the year, the director of Shanghai Housing and Land Administrative Bureau, Cai Yutian, said the government aimed to keep the price increase within 12 percent.
Last month, the bureau began this year's first bidding exercise for plots of land set aside for residential use, aiming to increase supply of new apartments in the city's housing market.
The city's housing authority allowed 44 plots for the bid, covering a total of 2.77 million square meters in 15 districts, the majority allocated for residential projects, according to its Website.
"It's more important for the government to prevent people from blindly pouring money into the property market to take profits, than just increase housing supply," Zhu said.