Nation tops list of steepest price climbs

Chinese cities occupied four of the top five places where home price saw the steepest increases, with Shenzhen topping the global list, according to a survey by an international real estate consultancy.

Shenzhen's home prices surged 62.5 percent year-on-year to March, according to London-based Knight Frank's Global Residential Cities Index. It was followed by Shanghai, where home prices rose 30.5 percent over the same period.

The average growth rate for the 150 cities, meanwhile, was 4.5 percent.

Nanjing and Beijing took fourth and fifth, with home prices rising 17.8 percent and 17.6 percent respectively.

The only non-Chinese city in the top five was Istanbul, which came third with home prices up 19.6 percent.

Knight Frank said loose monetary policy was one of the main reasons behind the big increase in home prices in Chinese cities, but the growth rate may slow through the year as some cities, including Shenzhen and Shanghai, have introduced new policies to rein in the overheated real estate market.

Under the new restrictive measures in Shenzhen, which came into effect in late March, for example, homebuyers without a local hukou,or household registration, are required to pay at least three years' tax to purchase one apartment, up from the previous one-year requirement.

Locals who have paid off the mortgage on their first apartment have to pay a down payment of 40 percent for a second home, compared with a previous 30 percent.

Transaction volume in the city dropped 27.1 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2016, due to bleak performance in the second quarter after the curbs were implemented.

Song Ding, director of the Tourism and Real Estate Industry Research Center at Shenzhen-based think tank China Development Institute, however, said recent signs have shown that Shenzhen's housing market is warming up again.

"Hot sales of luxury houses and record high sales prices of several plots of land have lifted investors' confidence in the city's property market," he said.

Since Thursday, seven banks in Shenzhen, including the Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Minsheng Bank, have raised their interest rates for first homebuyers to 90 percent of the current benchmark rate, up from 88 percent.

Wang Fei, director of the Centaline Property Research Center in Shenzhen, said the move reveals that the government is not willing to let Shenzhen's housing market go through another round of frenzy.

In Guangzhou, home prices increased 15.3 percent in the year to March, while Hangzhou saw an 11.9 percent rise, according to the survey