China's real estate development climate index showed a slight decline in April after experiencing rapid growth in the past years, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

From 96.6 points in March, the development climate index of China's real estate sector slipped down to 95.79 points in April, a slight drop of .61 point, according to a report from the bureau. This downward trend has been going on for the past consecutive months.

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The real estate development index is an industry measure that takes into account different aspects of the real estate industry, including size of property sold, volume of sales as well as property investment.

A rating of 100 indicates optimum growth rate, while indices falling between 95 and 100 represents moderate growth.

The total area of property sold in China for the first four months reached 277.09 million square meters. The figure shows a drop by 6.9 percent for the first four months compared to last year's figure.

The index for the four month period showed a steeper drop of about 3.1 percentage points compared with the decline seen during the first quarter.

Property sales volume also showed a decline for the period January to April by 7.8 percent. This figure is several notches up compared with decline of 5.2 percent reported for the first three months of 2014.

Even property investment showed a downward trend.  Data from the NBS showed that property investment in China amounted to 2.23 trillion yuan (approximately $ 362 billion) during the first four months of the current year indicating a slight slow down by .4 percent from the first quarter.