Prices climb higher

Property prices in 70 major cities rose by 11.3 percent year-on-year in January, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said yesterday.

The growth rate is 0.8 percentage points higher than December's. New home prices rose by 12.2 percent, compared with 11.4 percent in December, according to an NDRC and National Bureau of Statistics survey.

Second-tier cities have seen the fastest growth in new home prices. Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, topped all cities with annualized growth of 25 percent. In Nanning of Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, the rate was 20.3 percent.