A night view of the Pearl River in Guangzhou, capital of South China's Guangdong province. File photo

GUANGZHOU: Residential property prices fell an average of 5,230 yuan ($747.14) per square meter last month in Guangzhou's Tianhe district, a business center in this Guangdong provincial capital.

The average price for commercial apartments in Tianhe district now stands at 10,385 yuan per square meter, compared with 15,615 yuan per square meter in January, a drop of 33.5 percent.

Residential property prices in the city's financial district have now fallen to their lowest point in two years, according to a report recently released by the Guangzhou Land Resources and Housing Management Bureau.

And Li Wenjiang, an analyst with the Guangzhou-based Hopefluent Group Holding's Ltd, predicted that Tianhe's property prices will keep dropping this year.

"Many buyers have now adopted a wait-and-see attitude," Li said.

And the municipal government has also introduced more concrete and effective measures to help cool the over-heated real estate market and bring the soaring property prices under control, Li said.

And one of the effective measures was to increase the sales of low-priced and economic houses to local low-income residents, Li added.

Li said the over-heated real estate market is expected to return to normal this year.

Meanwhile, the average price of residential properties in other districts of Liwan, Baiyun, Yuexiu, Haizhu, Huangpu, Luogang and Panyu also saw a drop in February, according to statistics from the Guangzhou Land Resources and Housing Management Bureau.

The average property prices in the southern metropolis have come to 9,303 yuan a square meter, compared with more than 10,000 yuan a square meter in January, and the peak of 11,574 yuan a square meter last October.

And the city's number of residential transactions also reached its lowest point last month.

Only 231,200 sq m of commercial houses changed hands in the entire city in February, a year-on-year reduction of 69.4 percent.

About 349,500 sq m of property changed hands in Guangzhou in January.

And Chen Wencai, a Guangzhou resident, said the city's residential property prices are still "very high", which has kept many locals from purchasing their own homes just yet.

"I believe the fall in the property prices will continue in Guangzhou this year," Chen told China Daily on Friday.

The white-collar worker predicted that the average price of the city's residential homes will drop to no more than 8,000 yuan a square meter by the end of the year.

(HK Edition 03/31/2008 page2)