THE country’s housing market continued to ease in April, with second-tier and third-tier cities seeing a decline in home prices, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) yesterday. Home prices in the 70 major cities demonstrated an overall easing trend as the number of cities that notched a decrease in home prices increased, said the bureau’s senior statistician Sheng Guoqing, adding that on a year-on-year basis, these cities saw their housing prices decline or register slower growth. In April, 47 among 70 cities surveyed by the NBS reported new home prices falling from the previous month, compared with 38 cities recording a decline in March. New home prices in four first-tier cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou — edged up 0.2% month on month in April, moderating 0.1 percentage points from that in March, according to the NBS data. Prices of resale homes in the four cities inched up 0.4% month on month, unchanged from the growth in March. A total of 31 second-tier cities witnessed a month-on-month decline of 0.1% in new home prices, while 35 third-tier cities saw a month-on-month decline of 0.6% in new home prices. Yesterday’s data showed that the resale home prices in second-tier cities edged down 0.3% on a monthly basis, while those in third-tier cities went down 0.3% month on month. On a year-on-year basis, new home prices in first-tier cities rose 3.9% in April, narrowing 0.4 percentage points from that in March. New home prices in second-tier cities went up 1% year on year and those in third-tier cities decreased 1.5% year on year. (SD-Xinhua) | 