Home sales dive in july

Housing sales fell 28 percent month-on-month in July, the biggest monthly decline this year, as tight mortgage lending outweighed efforts by local governments to ease property curbs as prices and demand weakened.

The value of homes sold fell to 424.2 billion yuan ($69 billion) last month from 591.2 billion yuan in June, according to the difference between the National Statistics Bureau's data for the first seven months and the first half of the year.

The value of sales in the first seven months fell 10.5 percent to 2.99 trillion yuan from a year earlier, the data showed.