China to start housing price data reform
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China will carry out the House Sale Price Statistical Scheme in 2011, after soliciting opinions via the internet earlier this year, said Ma Jiantang, head of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) on Thursday.
Ma made the remarks at a national statistics work conference, saying the bureau had accepted suggestions from various departments and experts and would work steadily reform the method of calculating the country's house sale prices in 2011.
"We'll further work with real estate departments, make full use of their network data, and check the authenticity of the data to further push forward the statistical scheme reform," Ma said.
The NBS was committed to improve the scheme at the beginning of the year. It released the draft plan on September 25, which said prices, floor areas, and sales of newly-constructed houses in 35 major cities would be based upon data from local real estate departments, instead of independent research.
Ma said that the bureau is working on 4 key systems, including building a database for basic surveyed units, one set of standards for surveyed enterprises, data collecting and processing software systems, and direct reporting network systems.
"The four systems are aimed to guarantee the authenticity, integrity and timeliness of the data," he said.
By 2012, above-scale enterprises, above-norm wholesale and retail accommodations and catering businesses, construction enterprises, and real estate enterprises will be able to submit their data directly to a national data center, said the NBS.
Also, about 550 cities across the country will use personal digital assistants (PDA) to collect data for the consumer price index (CPI), a major gauge of inflation, as well as farm produce prices, by the end of 2012, the NBS said.
