New home sales rebounded in Shanghai last week, outstripping supply, while their average price also rose.

The area of new homes sold, excluding government-subsidized affordable housing, rose 15.5 percent to 319,000 square meters during the seven-day period ended on Sunday, Shanghai Centaline Property Consultants Co said in a report released yesterday.

“By district, Qingpu led with around 50,000 square meters of new homes sold, a week-on-week surge of 51.5 percent,” said Lu Wenxi, senior manager of research at Shanghai Centaline.

“Jiading, another outlying district, followed closely with transactions hitting 43,000 square meters, or a weekly increase of 30.3 percent.”

These new homes were sold for an average 36,993 yuan (US$5,539) per square meter, up 1.2 percent from the previous week, Centaline data showed.

Around 228,000 square meters of new homes were released to the local market, a weekly jump of 236.6 percent.

“Despite the significant surge, which snapped a four-week weakness, new home sales still outnumbered supply,” said Lu Qilin, director of research at Shanghai Homelink Real Estate Agency Co. “In particular, many of the new supply fell into the high-end and luxury sector, indicating that new home price will probably stay comparatively high in the coming weeks.”

Units in three of the city’s 10 best-selling projects cost 50,000 yuan per square meter and above, with units in two of them are priced at more than 80,000 yuan per square meter on average.

A total of 197 new housing units priced at 80,000 yuan per square meter and above were sold last week in the city, up by 10 from the previous week, a separate report by Shanghai Homelink showed yesterday.

(Source: ShanghaiDaily  Author: Cherry Cao)