BEIJING, July 15 (Xinhua) -- After three months of soaring sales starting from March, Beijing's villa sales in June saw a month-on-month drop of 42.24 percent from May, the China Securities Journal reported Wednesday.

    The sharp fall came as earlier robust sales steadily pushed up villa prices, according to house.focus.cn, one of China's leading real estate portal websites, which filed the figure.

    In the first half of this year, nearly 30 percent of the 136 villa projects on sale saw a price hike, with the biggest rise up to 60 percent, according to the website.

    Such drop in sales is mainly attributed to the developers' efforts to scale back the number of new villas offered for sale following three months' continuous growth, said experts on a real estate forum in Beijing.

    Another contributing factor came from the government which has been trying to push developers to build more moderately priced housing rather than villas and luxury apartments.

    The website's statistics showed the supply of high-end real estate projects declined in the first five months, with areas of finished projects down 5.59 percent year on year, while areas of such new projects fell 18.67 percent from a year ago.

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