Rafts of restrictions on home buyers will be lifted as city governments throughout China respond to the nation's cooling real estate market, Shanghai Securities News reported Friday.
Only Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen will keep up their restrictions while China's second- and third-tier cities loosen up regulations to handle oversupply, un-named officials at theMinistry of Housing and Urban-Rural Developmentwere quoted as saying.
"Many real estate agents told me that local governments in some second- and third-tier cities have already loosened their purchase limits," a Shanghai-based agent told the Global Times.
Typical restrictions under scrutiny might include, for instance, single people younger than 20 being banned from buying property, as is the case in Zhengzhou, capital city of Central China's Henan Province.
Other restrictions on buyers in second- and third-tier cities include providing proof of residence for more than three years or proof of social security or income tax paid for more than a year.
Home loan restrictions are still tight in big cities as real estate companies struggle with oversupply in smaller cities, said Chang Qing, a research fellow with a real estate brokerage Homelink.
"Consumers are maintaining a wait-and-see attitude," he told the Global Times.
Smaller city governments have been issuing packages of measures apparently intended to stop the bottom falling out of the sluggish market: Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province, forbade cuts in housing prices larger than 15 percent, the Qianjiang Evening News reported Friday.
Meanwhile in Shanghai, China Vanke Co slashed prices 9.8 percent to 37,000 yuan ($5,923.7) a square meter for one of its complexes, according to online property portal soufun.com.
The average price of new homes in Beijing is 25,007 yuan a square meter, a new seven-month low, data from another property brokerage Centaline Property showed. Some 7,000 second-hand homes sold in Beijing this month for an average price of 28,000 yuan a square meter, down 0.8 percent from April, according to Homelink.
Given the tepid performance, governments in first-tier cities will not further tighten controls over the market, Chang told the Global Times, but will not loosen them either.
