China's policies on restraining property speculation introduced in April have sent many private investors into a panic as they try to unload their houses at increasingly lower prices.

"My client, a woman around 40 years old, entrusted me to sell 24 houses in north Beijing for her on April 10, only a few days before the government cooling policy took effect," Mr. Li, a house broker in Beijing, said in an interview with the Beijing Evening News. "I have now sold all of them for a total of 130 million yuan ($19.2 million)."

Li said this is a larger trade compared with a similar one he made last December valued at 70 million yuan ($10.32 million).

According to Li, the woman is from east China's Zhejiang Province and is a longtime investor in the housing market. Li sold her houses in three months with great effort, because it has not been easy to sell homes recently.

Li said the owner of the houses did not lose money because she had bought them a few years earlier when prices were relatively low. The woman told Li that she saw the Beijing housing bubble as equivalent to that of Japan in the 1990s, which, in her opinion, would prompt the market to melt down.

Prior to April, when the policies on cooling the housing market were rolled out, over 50 percent of Beijing investors invested in Tongzhou and Wangjing, two areas with newly built living quarters, and hoarded houses, a popular practice then. "However, no investors have been seen in these two areas in the past three months," said Li.

A sample survey from Centaline Beijing, a real estate company, showed that the percentage of property investors in Beijing buying houses has declined to 14.5 percent from 41.2 percent in April, a drop of around 26 percent, which is even lower than the 18.8 percent during the global financial crisis in 2008.

In June, real estate developers began to promote the selling of their housing property by offering discounts or waiving estate management fees. Many large real estate businesses such as China Vanke, Poly Real Estate Group and Greenland Group have sold units in their new buildings at low prices.

Housing prices in other large Chinese cities have also witnessed a drop. In Shanghai, for instance, houses in the vicinity of the new Disneyland site, which will begin construction in November, are unsalable, despite a price drop of 20 to 30 percent this month. In contrast, housing prices in this area rose by 40 percent overnight when the news that Shanghai would build a Disneyland was released at the end of 2008.

Statistics from the Hainan Housing and Urban-Rural Development Department in China's island Hainan Province indicate that both housing prices and the number of units sold have dropped this year, with the average price in June declining by 41 percent compared with that in February, said a report in China Youth Daily.

(Source: Beijing Evening News, edited by LI YUZHU)