Top cities ease rules for home purchases

China's four major cities have all eased housing purchase restrictions in recent months, signaling a shift toward more supportive policies and underscoring efforts to stabilize the property sector, said industry experts.

Beijing is the latest major city to ease housing purchase restrictions. On Friday night, the capital city announced measures to better meet housing needs, including cutting the required social security or tax payment period for non-Beijing residents buying homes within the Fifth Ring Road from two years to one, and raising the housing provident fund loan limit.

"As a city long known for strict homebuying restrictions, Beijing's move to lower the threshold for nonlocal buyers without a Beijing hukou (household registration) could mark the beginning of a broader recovery in China's property market," said Zhang Dawei, chief analyst at Centaline Property Agency, after digesting the policies taking effect immediately on Saturday.

Beijing's move means all four of China's first-tier cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou — have now eased homebuying restrictions in line with local conditions, paving the way for a more relaxed housing market in the country's biggest cities, Zhang added.

In late February, Shanghai introduced a seven-point policy package to ease homebuying restrictions, helping sustain stability in the city's residential property sector, said Cheng Yu, executive vice-president of Shanghai enterprises at the China Index Academy.

"Shanghai sold 2.83 million square meters of commercial housing in the first seven months of this year, showing resilience despite the traditional seasonal slowdown in home transactions," said Cheng.

Similarly, policy adjustments introduced in Shenzhen in late April have produced encouraging results. The city's new measures continued to boost the housing market, with new home sales rising more than 40 percent year-on-year for three consecutive months and existing-home sales up more than 10 percent for two months in a row, said Cao Jingjing, general manager of research at the China Index Academy.

More than 680 housing policy measures have been introduced across China since the beginning of the year, including cuts in homebuying costs through lower down payments and mortgage rates, Cao said.

Beijing's latest housing policy adjustment follows the July 30 meeting of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, which set the direction for the country's economic work in the second half.

The meeting called for efforts to stabilize the property market and effectively build a security barrier for the sector.

"The statement places the property market within a broader framework of economic security and shows the central authorities' expectations that the sector should remain stable and orderly," said a report from Shanghai Proptech Innovations Co Ltd.

"China's property markets showed divergent trends in the first half, suggesting that the sector is moving beyond a broad-based recovery toward a phase of structural improvement," said Ding Zuyu, chairman of Shanghai Proptech Innovations.

Ding said this stage is characterized by the resilient performance of key cities and core areas, as well as a shift among real estate companies from scale expansion to competition based on inherent capabilities.

wang_ying@chinadaily.com.cn