(Yicai) April 12 -- Chinese property developers issued the most debt in six months in March, more than doubling sales to CNY67 billion (USD9.3 billion) from the previous month, as borrowing costs fell and the need for funding resurfaced after the lunar new year holiday.

The bonds carried an average coupon rate of 3.1 percent, down from 3.85 percent a year earlier and 3.3 percent in February, a report by the China Index Academy showed yesterday.

Pent-up demand for financing was released in March after the Chinese New Year holiday in February, leading to an upswing in bond sales, Liu Shui, corporate research director at the CIA, told Yicai.

From January to March, developers sold about CNY154.9 billion (USD21.4 billion) of new bonds, down almost 19 percent from a year ago, according to the report.

To support cash-strapped real estate developments and promote the market’s stable and healthy development, regulators set up a ‘whitelist’ mechanism in January. Under it, local governments send the names of high-quality projects to commercial banks in the hope of matching them with loans.

Thirty-one provincial-level regions and Xinjiang Production and Construction, a state-owned enterprise in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, had all proposed whitelisted projects to banks as of March 31.

Almost 1,980 projects have been green-lit for about CNY469 billion (USD64.8 billion) of loans, and nearly 1,250 of them have already received CNY155.4 billion.

Editor: Emmi Laine