China's property market cools due to government intervention

Rising property prices in China are abating as a result of government measures.

"The turning point of China's home prices has come," Shen Jian-guang, an economist at Mizuho Securities, told Bloomberg.

"Prices not only fell for new homes and in major cities, but also in secondary cities and in the existing home market."

House prices fell in 33 of 70 cities monitored by the government, almost double the September results, which recorded falls in 17 cities.

In 2009 China introduced a battery of measures to cool the real estate market. It increased the mandatory down payment for mortgages, which restricting the number of homes people could buy and at the same time reduced financing to real estate developers.

Wall Street Journal calculations based on data released Friday by China's National Bureau of Statistics showed prices of newly built homes in the 70 cities fell 0.13% on average in October from the previous month, compared with a 0.01% increase in both September and August.

The bureau doesn't release a single average figure for the country.