Real Estate

People inquire about the price of houses at a fair in Fuzhou, Fujian province, on May 26. China's house prices fell to a 16-month low in May.

China's house prices fell to a 16-month low in May as officials pledged to keep property curbs that have sapped demand, according to SouFun Holdings Ltd, owner of the nation's biggest real estate website.

Shanghai eased home purchase restrictions to allow a broader pool of buyers to purchase a second property in China’s financial center, Shanghai Securities News reported today.

The city loosened its definition of locals to let residence permit holders who have lived in the city for at least three years to buy a second home, the official newspaper affiliated with state-run Xinhua news agency said, citing an unidentified official of the city’s housing regulator. It previously limited the second-home option to locals, or those born in the city or who worked for an extended period of time and were officially recognized as locals, without specifying guidelines for non-locals.

China is building a replica Alpine village in a grimy industrial city.

It hopes the chalets in the southern city of Huizhou will be sought after by homesick Europeans.

The village will be a £5.7billion copy of Hallstatt in Austria, complete with artificial lake. Posing as tourists, the Chinese have been photographing every building there for three years.

The copy of Hallstatt in Guangzhou China.

Real Hallstatt in Austria

China will likely loosen its restrictions on the country's property market in the third quarter of next year, as plummeting prices could slow the growth of the economy, according to a university report.

Property prices, sales and investment will fall in the first quarter of next year because of the government's tightening measures, according to a report released by the Beijing-based Renmin University of China on Saturday. It added that the possibility of a market collapse is slim.

A 20-percent fall in housing prices will force the government to adjust its policies, as a steeper decline will bring economic growth below 9 percent next year, the report said.