Most of the sales decline stemmed from China's largest cities, the report said. Those so-called tier-1 cities have been a bright spot since people tend to move to urban centers for jobs.Investors in Chinese property developers are also getting more skeptical about the market.
While that plan "has been instrumental to setting a floor to this crisis," the initiatives are only aimed at supporting developers' debts at a project level, S&P Global Ratings analysts said in a May 22 report. In April, the analysts pointed out that national property sales fell to 900 billion yuan , below last year's monthly average of 1.1 trillion yuan.
This year's forecasts are based on expectations that sales in larger cities grow by about 3%, while sales in smaller cities don't drop by more than 10%, the report said.In the secondary-home market, business activity "has been cooling since April, with a fall in the number of listed-for-sale homes, lower asking prices and fewer transactions," Fitch Ratings said in a release Monday.