BEIJING, (Reuters) – September saw a slowdown in Chinese home prices. This was due to a continued crackdown on speculation and caps on home purchases. A private sector survey on Friday showed that this trend has been continuing.

The September increase in new home prices in 100 cities was 0.14%, compared to 0.2% in August. This is according data from China Index Academy. It’s one of China’s most respected independent real-estate research organizations.

Some cities intensified their campaign to push speculators off the property market by taking specific steps like caps on speculation for school districts.

Late September saw Shenyang in the northeast and Haikou in the south urging agencies and real estate agents to avoid hyping properties in schools districts.

In a note, Nomura stated that “we expect the current property curbs to remain in place in the short term” because Beijing is placing national strategic importance on reining property bubbles and directly intervening with credit supply for property sectors, making it difficult to ease these curbs.

In the largest tier-one city of Shanghai, prices rose by 0.16 percent. This is a significant increase over August’s 0.11%.

After August’s 0.31% increase, monthly home prices in Tier-two cities and provincial capitals rose 0.17%. Prices in tier-3 cities and tier-4 cities increased 0.1%, against a 0.12% decrease in August.

The September increase in new home prices was 3.4% compared to August’s gain of 3.51%.

As the property crisis in China Evergrande Group worsened, sentiment has been shaken by worries about default risk among real estate companies.

China’s central bank pledged to protect homeowners exposed to property and infused more cash into banks as Shenzhen began investigation of Evergrande, the wealth management unit.

Mid-October will see the official September numbers from China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

(Reporting Liangping Gao, Tony Munroe; Editing: Leslie Adler