A newly built residential building is seen in Fuzhou, East China's Fujian Province, on March 1, 2023. Photo: VCG

Top 100 real estate developers' sales in February saw year-on-year and month-on-month growth, boosted by the economic recovery in leading Chinese cities.

The sales of China's top 100 developers totaled 461.56 billion yuan ($66.8 billion) in February, up 14.9 percent on a yearly basis and up 29.1 percent on a monthly basis, according to a report released on Wednesday by the China Real Estate Information Corp (CRIC), a provider of real estate information.

Overall property supply in the 30 largest cities rebounded, with an increase of 7 percent from January, while transactions jumped by more than 40 percent, both on an annual and monthly basis.

Transactions were flat in December.

Cumulative sales in the first two months of this year ended the real estate sector's slump, with the market showing signs of a rapid recovery, the CRIC report noted. 

In January and February, sales of the top 10 developers were up 25 percent year-on-year to 24.17 billion yuan.

Poly Real Estate Group achieved 31 billion yuan in sales in February, staying in the top spot, followed by Vanke with 28.41 billion yuan and Country Garden with 27.74 billion yuan.

CRIC said that the performance of real estate enterprises continued to diverge, with the competitiveness of small and medium-sized developers still weak.

In February, some cities readjusted their demand-side policies for the property market. According to monitoring by the China Index Academy (CIA), as many as 30 cities reduced the floor for mortgage interest rates for first-time homebuyers to below 4 percent.

Since January, property policies have continued to ease, and some second-tier cities continued to announce favorable policies. 

At the same time, demand increased and more consumers said that they expected to buy homes, which led to the increase in sales, said Liu Yong, chief researcher at the CIA.

 "Housing sales in March will continue to grow vigorously," said Liu.


Global Times