(Yicai) Sept. 13 -- Cities in China, including Suzhou and Dalian, have a flexible and open attitude toward housing price drops, different from their attempts to contain such declines by administrative orders two years ago.

Housing prices in first-tier cities have shown a positive trend recently thanks to favorable policies, while those in third- and fourth-tier cities have greatly dropped.

Some homes in Suzhou are sold at a 23 percent discount from the price filed at government agencies. Buyers in Wuhan, Hefei, Dalian, and Tianjin also noted on local governments’ message boards that house prices have significantly fallen this year.

Cities approach housing price declines differently. The Suzhou Real Estate Trading Center pointed out that selling prices cannot be higher than the filed ones, but there are no restrictions on their lower limit, and actual selling prices are mainly subject to negotiations between buyers and developers.

Housing prices are formed via market competition and are subject to the economic and real estate market situation, according to the Dalian Municipal Bureau of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. Some homes are difficult to sell, which causes great financial pressure on developers, so they cut prices to ensure the construction of such properties and ease the pressure, it noted.

This Year, around 20 cities, including Chuzhou in Anhui province and Ziyang in Sichuan province, have issued policies to support group buying of houses, but such preferential prices are not taken for a drop from the filed ones, according to statistics from Zhuge Data Research Center.

More than 20 cities released administrative orders to curb the falling prices of houses and stabilize the real estate market in 2021, with most of them being third- and fourth-cities where the real estate was sluggish.

For local governments, if housing prices decline significantly, it will affect land’s selling costs, so large-scale and big drops will not happen, said Zhang Hongwei, founder of Jingjian Consulting. Just some developers are lowering prices to ease financial pressure, and cities should consider all factors, including sellers, buyers, developers, and government, rather than focus on one aspect, Zhang added.

The price of new houses in 100 Chinese cities was on average CNY16,176 (USD2,219) per square meter last month, basically unchanged from a month earlier, after falling since May, data from China Index Academy showed.

Editor: Martin Kadiev