Official figures released by China’s finance ministry show that the country’s property slump dealt a serious blow to state revenue from land transfers in 2015, a key source of funding for already cash-strapped local governments.

For years China’s often debt-saddled localities have relied on requisitioning and selling land under their purview for profit or to make up for budget shortfalls, encouraging overbuilding. But figures released this week by the Ministry of Finance show that revenue from such land transfers plummeted 21.6 per cent last year to RMB3.365 trillion.

Land allocated for real estate likewise dropped 20.9 per cent from the previous year to 119,800 hectares. That fall is proportionally smaller than the 25.5 per cent drop seen in 2014, but that year’s total annual revenue from transfers actually rose 3.1 per cent, suggesting most local government coffers were under substantially more duress last year.

The finance ministry attributed the fall in revenue to causes including insufficient market demand and gradual slowdown in the growth of land prices. It credited a fourth-quarter 9.5 per cent rise in annualized revenue to supportive government policies, among other factors, but that growth fell far short of making up for the first three quarters’ drops of between 26 and 38 per cent.

Few local governments were immune from the drop: the ministry listed Shenzhen, Tibet, the city of Xiamen and Gansu as the only administrative regions that saw year-on-year growth in revenue from land transfers. Far at the other end of the spectrum, the northeastern port city of Dalian saw the biggest annualized drop, with revenue plummeting 56.4 per cent from 2014.