About this Newsletter: Get a quick but more granular view of (still) one of the most important sectors in China, with the weekly chart and commentary from Real Estate Foresight (REF) - drawing on 14+ years of REF's research on China housing markets.

The official NBS national new home sales data for March is expected in mid-April.

In our research at Real Estate Foresight, we use a higher-frequency indicator to approximate the direction of the monthly NBS data. 'Higher frequency' is a relative term, and in this case, we look at the weekly CREIS data. We consider the daily data too noisy.

Based on that weekly data, we track new home sales in around 18 major cities, and the 18-city aggregate metric we calculate tends to indicate the direction of the monthly national NBS figure (here in terms of the 52-week / 12-month growth metrics to the week ending on March 29):

As an example in hindsight - see our post from November last year, when the same framework correctly pointed to a turning point (downward).

The latest data suggests it's not only too early to expect a turn towards 'less negative' at an aggregate level (not yet), but rather expect another extended decline.

Still, in terms of the sequential growth in the weekly data, we have seen some strong figures in the past weeks:

These are extracts from REF Weekly New Home Sales Analysis, one of the several regular reports in the REF China Property Research subscription service.