Shop online to save for a home?

BEIJING - Good news for the millions of Chinese housewives hooked on online shopping: the more they spend online, the greater discount they will get on a home purchase under a new program.

China Vanke Co and Alibaba's eBay-like Taobao.com jointly launched a program this week that offers home price cuts based on a shopper's spending on the website last year.

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The discounts could be as high as two million yuan ($325,000) while those who spent under 50,000 yuan will get 50,000-yuan discount when buying a Vanke home before September 30.

Included in the program are apartments and villas in Vanke's 23 real estate projects in 12 first- and second-tier cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hangzhou.

The tie-up between Vanke and Taobao is novel as it is done in accordance with "Internet thinking," a new buzz term used by Chinese Internet marketers to mean promotions offered across various platforms to better identify with web-savvy would-be customers.

But the cooperation is hardly more than the latest tactic of Chinese home developers to drive sales and unload stockpiles in the languid real estate market.

China's property sector showed new signs of cooling in July, with more cities reporting month-on-month price drops for both new and existing homes. The sales volume dropped accordingly as a wait-and-see sentiment prevailed.

In a bid to kickstart the market, real estate firms have been offering discounts, gifts like cellphones or even car washes by bikini-clad models.

At the same time, more than 30 cities have eased or lifted property purchases restrictions introduced in 2010 to cool the then overheated market.

Vanke said in an interim financial report that its home sales in the first half of 2014 bucked the sluggish trend and grew 14.6 percent year on year to 8.2 million square meters.