Investment in China's property sector rose 27.9 percent in 2011 from a year earlier to 6.17 trillion yuan (972 billion U.S. dollars), said Ma Jiantang, chief of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), at a press conference Tuesday.

Full-year investment in residential housing registered an increase of 30.2 percent from the same period the year before, down 2.6 percentage points from 2010.

Sales of commercial housing rose 4.9 percent to 1.1 billion square meters in 2011, down 8 percentage points from that of the first three quarters of 2011 and 5.7 percentage points from that of 2010, said Ma.

Commercial housing sales volume climbed 12.1 percent to 5.9 trillion yuan in 2011, down 6.8 percentage points from 2010, according to the NBS.

A total of 271.94 million square meters of commercial housing were held for sale, up 26.1 percent year-on-year, said Ma. The figure surged 18 percentage points from the previous year.