Home prices seen up in March

China's property market continued to heat up in March, official data showed Thursday, with new home prices rising in almost all major Chinese cities in the month as home buyers rushed to close deals ahead of the implementation of new tightening measures, official data showed Thursday.

Prices of new homes in 68 of 70 major cities rose in March from the month before, up from 66 in February, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Thursday.

Average home prices in first-tier cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou posted large year-on-year rises in March, the data showed.

Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong Province, saw the biggest year-on-year increase with an 11.1 percent rise in March, according to the NBS data.

In Beijing, prices rose 8.6 percent year-on-year in March.

"Home buyers rushed into the market to close deals due to concerns over higher home costs after the issuance of new government controls, and developers also canceled discounts and hiked prices," Liu Jianwei, a senior statistician at the NBS, said in a separate statement.

"There was a policy vacuum in March ahead of the implementation of the new government tightening measures," Chen Guoqiang, vice-president of China Real Estate Society, told the Global Times Thursday.

"Sales continued the upward trend seen in February and the increase of transactions pushed up prices. But prices are likely to fall in the second quarter," Chen said.

The central government announced on March 1 that it would introduce a new capital gains tax of 20 percent on profits from secondhand home sales, along with higher down-payments and mortgages for second-time home buyers.

At the end of March, local governments in major cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou all rolled out detailed regulations to cool down the housing market ahead of the government's deadline for local governments to spell out their own rules.

The Beijing municipal government announced that unmarried individuals with permanent residence registration in Beijing will not be allowed to buy a second home and vowed to strictly implement the 20 percent tax on capital gains.

"Despite the central government's determination to curb property prices, local governments are not enthusiastic about implementing the tightening measures, so they have issued exemption rules," Li Youhuan, an economist at Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.