Average prices of newly built commercial-residential buildings in the country's four first-tier cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, all surged in 2010, according to China Real Estate Information Corp (CRIC), the Shanghai Securities News reported Wednesday.

More specifically, prices of newly built residential buildings in Beijing averaged 20,328 yuan ($3,022.75) per square meter, representing an increase of 42 percent year-on-year, the highest of the four. That is followed by a 40 percent surge in Shanghai, which pushed up the city's average price of newly built residential buildings to 22,261 yuan per square meter.

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The average price in Guangzhou grew 23 percent year-on-year to 11,579 yuan per square meter, with Shenzhen up 33 percent year-on-year to 20,596 yuan per square meter.

Meanwhile, sold area and units in the four cities all fell in 2010, thanks to the government's tightening policies, as well as the high comparison base in 2009, the paper said.

Sold area in Beijing totaled 12 million square meters in 2010, while Shanghai reached 9.37 million square meters, followed by Guangzhou (8.96 million square meters) and Shenzhen (3.09 million square meters), but the paper did not give correlation data from 2009.

As for land transfer fees, Beijing, Shanghai and Dalian made it into the "billion yuan club," with the three cities reaching 160 billion, 150 billion and 110 billion yuan, according to CRIC.

Notably, land prices and overall land transfer fees shot up in second-tier cities, the paper said. Total transfer fees in Dalian jumped 310 percent year-on-year, and the growth rate for Changsha, Harbin, and Wuhan were all above 100 percent year-on-year, it said.

"Real estate is still the pillar industry in many cities, considering the large portion the land transfer fees take up in local governments' fiscal revenue. Second-tier cities, alongside their first-tier peers, are increasingly dependent on land finance," Wang Haibin, chief analyst at WorldUnion Properties, told the paper.