2nd LD-Writethru: China's real estate investment up 7 pct in 2017

BEIJING, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- China's investment in real estate development grew 7 percent year on year in 2017, 0.1 percentage point faster than a year earlier, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said Thursday.

The total property investment in 2017 was nearly 11 trillion yuan (about 1.7 trillion U.S. dollars), the NBS said.

Among this total, the investment in residential buildings went up by 9.4 percent year on year.

The newly built floor space was 1.8 billion square meters, up by 7 percent year on year. The newly built floor space of residential buildings surged by 10.5 percent.

The floor space of commercial buildings sold was 1.7 billion square meters, up by 7.7 percent year on year, while the floor space of residential buildings sold went up by 5.3 percent.

The total sales of commercial buildings were 13.4 trillion yuan, up 13.7 percent year on year, among which the sales of residential buildings rose 11.3 percent.

The land space purchased for real estate development was 255 million square meters, up 15.8 percent year on year.

By the end of the year, the floor space of commercial buildings for sale was 589.2 million square meters, down 15.3 percent from the end of 2016.

The funds in place for real estate development enterprises reached 15.6 trillion yuan last year, up 8.2 percent year on year.

NBS data also showed that the property market remained largely stable in December, with house prices edging down slightly in major cities amid tough purchase restrictions.

On a monthly basis, December's new residential housing prices in first-tier cities stayed unchanged from November, and prices of existing houses went down 0.1 percent.

In contrast, the property market in second- and third-tier cities is showing signs of picking up, with new residential housing prices gaining 0.6 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively, from a month earlier, NBS data showed.

The annual property investment growth slightly outpaced the GDP growth.

China's GDP grew 6.9 percent year-on-year in 2017, well above the official target of around 6.5 percent and higher than the 6.7 percent growth registered in 2016.

This also marked the first acceleration in annual GDP growth pace since 2010. Enditem