Nation to further shore up housing with policy tools

Flexible home credit policies will be executed in accordance with the specific condition of each city's property market, and financial policies should be well and fully used to serve the real economy, official sources said.

During a joint meeting held on Tuesday focusing on financial sector's support to the real economy, the People's Bank of China, the nation's central bank, and the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission stressed upholding the positioning of "housing is for living in, not for speculation", and various housing credit policies should be applied from city to city to better meet homebuyers' rational housing requirements, according to the PBOC's official website.

To this end, a prudent management system should be executed in real estate finance, risks between projects and corporates should be differentiated, and property financing should remain stable and orderly, the meeting said.

"The meeting has included satisfying the basic needs of the real estate industry in the whole system of the real economy, and requiring the whole sector to maintain the stable and virtuous cycle," said Chen Sheng, president of the China Real Estate Data Academy.

Such requirements cannot be achieved without the property market's healthy and stable development, Chen said.

The property market's performance in the first quarter has reflected a need to introduce more policies to further stabilize the real estate market, to better serve people's living consumption requirements and form a smooth circulation across the industrial chain in regard to land, development, sales and delivery, said Li Yujia, chief researcher at the Provincial Residential Policy Research Center of Guangdong.

Wang Xiaoqiang, chief analyst with Zhuge Real Estate Data Research Center, said he believes there will be further adjustments including decreasing payment proportion and cutting home loan interest.

More than 85 Chinese cities have announced policies to encourage rational demand by easing curbs on home purchasing since the beginning of the year, but the home market's performance in the first quarter suggested more support is needed in boosting rational home demand, Wang said.

Abiding by the principles of market and law of order, financial organizations will pay attention to providing financial services to major real estate enterprises in risk settlement and project mergers and acquisitions, the meeting said.

Reading into the meeting's message, Chen said he expected stronger, more comprehensive and effective measures for both homebuyers and real estate corporations to solve related problems.

The policy adjustments announced previously were mostly targeted to encourage rational home consumption, be it loosening purchase restrictions, loan limitations, and sales curbs, or adjusting mortgage interest rates. "But so far these supportive policies were not adequate to alleviate the financing problems of private-owned real estate enterprises, and these companies' confidence is yet to be fully recovered," Chen said.

As for people who met difficulties in paying off home loans due to the COVID-19 pandemic, commercial banks should optimize their credit measures in a timely manner, and flexibly adjust these people's personal home mortgage repayment schedules, the meeting said.

In this current outbreak, many Chinese cities were impacted, and some of their residents' personal income faces temporary difficulties. The measures targeting these people's home loan repayments will effectively stabilize market expectations, said Chen Wenjing, deputy director of research with the China Index Academy.

Top regulators' addressing along with local governments' respective efforts will accelerate China's housing market to recover, navigate cities to a faster recovery from the current outbreak, eliminate risks appearing in the property market, and therefore promote the sector's healthy development and forming of a virtuous circle, Wang said.