China July property investment slows further but sales improve

Beijing

CHINA'S real estate investment growth continued to slow in the first seven months of 2015 due to weak new construction, but property sales and housing investment improved, indicating a mixed recovery in the struggling property market.

Property investment, a main driver of the economy, grew 4.3 per cent in the January to July period from a year earlier, the slowest rate since the March quarter of 2009, data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed on Wednesday.

Wednesday's weak property investment data is a bad omen for China's economic growth, which has stalled as low overseas demand cut into exports and industrial production, prompting the People's Bank of China to devalue t…