(Yicai Global) Feb. 10 -- The amount raised by China’s biggest property developers in January fell by a lesser amount year on year than last January’s drop, indicating that the financing situation in the country's real estate sector is improving after a year of relaxing fundraising curbs and other forms of policy support, according to the latest data.

Eighty major real estate companies raised CNY54.4 billion (USD8 billion) last month, a plunge of 44.2 percent from a year earlier, but a big improvement on the 56 percent dive in January 2022, according to real estate data cruncher CRIC.

The week-long Lunar New Year holiday arrived in January this year, leading to a slump in financing both month on month and year on year, said Liu Shui, head of the business department at the China Index Academy. But when compared with February last year, which is the month that Spring Festival fell in, January’s sales were up 40.1 percent.

Developers started to issue overseas bonds again in January after a wave of earlier defaults put off foreign investors. State-owned firms Guangzhou Yuexiu Group and China Jinmao Holdings Group were able to sell debt offshore. And Wanda Commercial Management Group has issued USD700 million in two-year bonds since January, all of which were oversubscribed, to raise funds to pay existing debts. It is the first private developer since the liquidity crisis began to issue US Dollar bonds.

But there is still a big gap between the amount that developers are able to raise and the debts that are about to mature, even though property sales are slowly improving. Around CNY1 trillion (USD147 billion) of debt needs to be repaid this year.

The government may introduce more incentives in the coming months, such as by trimming the loan prime rate and mortgage rates for first-time buyers, said Chen Chen, vice president and senior analyst at US credit rating agency Moody’s. It also could lift restrictions and make it easier for people to buy houses and apply for loans.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor