Property sales in China's major cities have seen an increase for four straight weeks due to developers' price-cutting efforts over the past few months.

China Index Institute, the country's largest real estate research organization, said in a report yesterday that 90 percent of 33 large and medium-scaled cities experienced an increase in property sales last week.

Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, saw the largest weekly increase of 85.88 percent, followed by Hangzhou and Chongqing. The transaction volumes in Beijing and Shanghai were also up 45.05 percent and 20.2 percent respectively.

"The soaring transaction volumes are a result of falling prices, as potential buyers are pretty sensitive to the price," said Huang Yu, deputy director of China Index Institute.

A total of 787,600 sq m of property changed hands in Shanghai in February, up 129 percent from a year earlier, according to statistics from UWIN, a Shanghai-based real estate research center. The average sales price, however, was down 13.94 percent month-on-month, standing at 12,141 yuan per sq m.

The sentiment of pre-owned sellers also changed, betting on a rebound in property price.

Kerry, a Hong Kong resident now working in Beijing, planned to see an apartment in Central Park, a high-end residential building in the capital's CBD area, last weekend. But she gave the plan up as the seller raised the price per sq m from 22,000 yuan to 26,000 yuan.

"It is unbelievable that the seller increased the price by 4,000 yuan just within a week," said Kerry.

But Zhong Wei, a professor at the Financial Research Center of Beijing Normal University, said the warming market of the past two months doesn't necessarily mean the country's property prices will rebound this year.

"The apartments in current stock could be hardly sold out within three years, given the average annual sales from 2005 to 2007," said Zhong. "So, the best situation for this year's property market could be a stabilized price and growing transaction volumes."

(China Daily March 5, 2009)