China's house-price slump drags on as Beijing battles to shore up the country's crisis-hit property sector

• Chinese house prices fell last month, according to data released Friday.
• The world's second-largest economy is grappling with a property crisis that's threatened to drag down growth.

China's housing slump dragged on last month, official government data released Friday showed, underlining why Beijing opted to roll out a stimulus package in a bid to soothe the country's crisis-hit property market.

The National Bureau of Statistics surveyed 70 cities and found that new-home prices dropped by just under 0.3% in August, extending a losing streak that began in June.

Existing-home prices also fell 0.48% in August, per Friday's data, for their worst month in nine years.

The figures cover a period before policymakers slashed down-payment requirements and allowed lenders to cut mortgage rates in a bid to boost China's long-suffering real-estate sector.

In 2021, property giant Evergrande collapsed after it ran out of cash to repay its debts, with the developer ultimately filing for bankruptcy almost two years later.

That sparked a broader crisis that's dragged on other smaller firms, with Country Garden, Fantasia Holdings, and Sunac all suffering financial woes in the years since Evergrande failed.

Falling house prices tend to weigh on a country's overall level of wealth, which fuels a decline in spending that drags down growth.

In March, Beijing said it was aiming for the economy to expand 5% this year.

Forecasters at the time labeled that target under-ambitious, but it's since come to look grimly realistic as policymakers battle a combination of economic issues including deflation, soaring youth unemployment, and a slump in exports.