About

The 70-City Residential Price Index (70城商品住宅销售价格指数) is published monthly by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), covering 70 medium-to-large Chinese cities. It tracks price movements for both new commercial residential properties (新建商品住宅) and second-hand residential properties (二手住宅).

NBS Index Methodology

Price basis: Per-square-meter unit price (yuan/m², 元/平方米, by gross floor area), not total price. For second-hand homes, the unit price excludes transaction taxes and fees.

Index calculation: NBS classifies properties into three size categories (≤90 m², 90–144 m², >144 m²) and computes sub-indices for each. Each sub-index uses double-weighting (双加权): computed once weighted by sales area, once weighted by sales value, then simple-averaged. The sub-indices are then aggregated into a city-level overall index. This page provides both the overall index and the floor-area breakdown — select via the "Property" dropdown.

Matching across months: To ensure like-for-like comparison, NBS classifies projects into: (1) Continuous — transactions in both current and prior month, compared directly; (2) New entry — first sale or no sales for 4+ months, prior-month price is estimated; (3) Gap — no prior-month sale, matched to the most recent transaction within 3 months. This is not a hedonic model but a matched-sample / comparable-quality approach (comparable-quality principle, 同质可比原则).

Data sources: New home prices use comprehensive online contract-signing (online filing, 网签) records from local housing authorities. Second-hand prices are sampled from licensed brokerages and housing platforms, selecting the transaction closest to the 15th of each month for each district/type cell.

No-transaction rule: If a city has no transactions in a given month, the price level is regarded as unchanged (index = 100).

Controls

Property: Select the property type and floor-area segment. "New Home" and "Used Home" are the NBS city-level aggregate indices. The floor-area breakdowns (≤90m², 90–144m², >144m²) are the NBS sub-indices published in Tables 3 and 4 of each monthly release.

Index Type:

• YoY (year-on-year, 同比): Current month vs. same month previous year (prior year same month = 100).
• MoM (month-on-month, 环比): Current month vs. previous month (prior month = 100).
• Cumulative (cumulative change, 累计涨跌): Chain-linked from MoM data: Index_t = 100 × ∏(MoM_i/100). Shows cumulative price change since the selected start date (85 = prices fell 15%). Uses the same chain-linking method NBS uses for its fixed-base index (定基指数). Most reliable within a 5-year window — beyond that, composition drift may accumulate as the matched-sample approach is not a hedonic model.

Tier Averages

Tier 1/2/3 Averages (一线/二线/三线城市均值) are simple arithmetic means across all cities in each tier. Tier 1 (4): Beijing (北京), Shanghai (上海), Guangzhou (广州), Shenzhen (深圳). Tier 2 (31): provincial capitals and major cities. Tier 3 (35): smaller prefecture-level cities.