(Yicai Global) Sept. 18 -- Housing prices have fallen or flattened in the 15 first-tier and key second-tier cities in China last month, with a slowdown in year-on-year price rise.

Property prices declined or flattened in all the first-tier and key second-tier cities last month, and year-on-year price growth slowed by 1.3 to 6.6 percentage points compared with the previous month, said Liu Jianwei, a senior statistician at the urban statistics department of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), while commenting on NBS' August housing price statistics for 70 major cities outed today.

New and second-hand property prices rose by 0.2 percent and 0.3 percent on average respectively in the other second-tier cities surveyed, marking a slowdown of 0.2 and 0.1 percentage point in price rise compared with those recorded in July. New property prices rose 0.4 percent in the third-tier cities, down 0.2 percentage point from a month earlier; and second-hand property prices nudged up 0.4 percent, tying the record for the previous month.