The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is set to use the local bureaus of land and resources' online contract databases for new-home price statistics in 35 large- and medium-sized cities, Xinhua and the Beijing News reported.

The NBS has published the draft proposal on its website on Sept 25 for public comments. The new plan is expected to be launched in 2011, according to NBS director Ma Jiantang .

For the other 35 cities without online contracting systems, the NBS will collect home transaction prices from developers rather than specialized investigation. The new home prices will be calculated in accordance with the sales areas and revenues from the data.

Ma admitted earlier that there are defects in the current approaches for home prices statistics as fundamental data was dependent only on developers‘ reporting.

For second-hand home prices, key-point investigation and typical investigation would be applied in the statistics, and data would be jointly collected from agencies, local bureaus of land and resources, and on-site investigators, the Beijing News said.

(chinadaily.com.cn September 27, 2010)