6/10/2010, By Jia Xu (chinadaily.com.cn) The National Bureau of Statistics of China released a series of figures on the Chinese real estate sector in 70 major Chinese cities from January to May, xinhuanews.com.cn reported Thursday.

Overall commercial building sales have reached 1.58 trillion yuan, a 38.4% increase from last year, and commercial building sales amount increased 33.6%.

This year’s property investment as of May also increased 38.2%, with 1.39 trillion yuan; among which, investment in residential commercial buildings, which took 69.3% of the overall property investment, reached 964.3 billion yuan, a 35.7% increase.

In May 2010 alone, housing sales price grew 12.4%. For the new residential buildings, price soared 15.1%, sales price of economically affordable housing increased by 1.4%, and commercial building sales price increased 0.4%.

On property investments in May, figures show the overall real estate investment in May was 398 billion yuan , a 64.8 billion yuan increase from April.

The overall commercial residential housing space increased 19.9%, office buildings climbed 74.5%, and business occupancy went up 45.7%.