House prices in 70 major Chinese cities fell 1.3 percent in March from a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday.

The month-on-month figure, however, rose 0.2 percent in March.

In the first quarter, the area of commercial houses sold rose 8.2 percent to 113 million square meters and sales jumped 23.1 percent to 505.9 billion yuan (US$74 billion), the NBS said.

Prices of new houses fell 1.9 percent year-on-year last month but rose 0.1 percent from February. Prices for second-hand houses rose 0.3 percent month-on-month despite of a decline of 0.4 percent from a year earlier.

Analysts warned it was still too early to say the property market had revived, as sales were mainly driven by surging credit and by stimulus policies, such as tax cuts. Other indicators, such as land purchases by developers, had shown no signs of recovery.

Floor areas of newly built houses in the first quarter tumbled 16.2 percent to 201 million sq m. The decline was 1.4 percentage points more than the January-February figure.

Land purchased for homebuilding fell more than 40 percent in the first quarter to 47.42 million sq m, and the actual area developed shrank 11.3 percent to 52.2 million sq m.

China Vanke, the country's biggest property developer by market value, reported on April 11 its first-quarter sales rose 21 percent to 12.22 billion yuan. Those of Poly Real Estate Group, the second-biggest, doubled to 6.48 billion yuan.

(Xinhua News Agency April 14, 2009)