Business news for Mon, 24 Dec 2007 & with words director+market. 2 news.

UK house prices fell the most in three years in December and the threat of more declines may cause the property market to seize up in 2008, Hometrack Ltd said. The average cost of a home in England and Wales slipped for a third month, dropping 0.3 percent to 175,200 pounds ($347,877), the London-based research group said yesterday. The number of property transactions will fall 17 percent and prices will rise just one percent next year, Hometrack forecast. Bank of England policy makers said this month that a drop in house prices seemed "more pronounced" than expected as they cut their benchmark interest rate for the first time in two years. Record debt, higher mortgage costs and the property market's worst performance since 1995 have discouraged homebuyers. "The second half of the year has seen a major reversal in confidence," Richard Donnell, director of research at Hometrack, said in a statement. "Just as the financial markets have faced a liquidity

GENERAL Motors Corp said it has become the first overseas car maker to sell one million units on the Chinese mainland this year. The milestone is a result of GM adopting a multi-brand strategy and growing its lineup of vehicles in the world's second largest auto market over the past 10 years. GM didn't give specific sales figure for the whole year. Last year, it sold 876,747 units on the mainland, a jump of 32 percent from 2005 and outpaced the growth of the entire auto industry of 25 percent. The one-millionth figure was marked when GM China Group President and Managing Director Kevin Wale handed the keys to a Buick Park Avenue to Zhang Jianping at Shanghai GM's corporate showroom in Shanghai last Friday. It took GM five years to boost sales by 10 times from 100,000 units in 2002 to one million units this year amid fierce competition with rivals like Volkswagen and Toyota. Detroit-based GM, the world's largest car maker, has a flagship passenger car venture Shanghai