New focus to bolster China’s housing market

SHANGHAI: The Central Financial Work Conference’s statement on the property sector, along with the various supportive measures rolled out in recent months, will provide strong support for China’s housing market and help meet reasonable demand, industry experts say.

Held in Beijing over Monday and Tuesday, the conference made it clear three categories of projects will be prioritised in the development of property finance. They are projects mainly meeting inelastic demand, projects for improved living requirements and government-subsidised projects.

The conference said each city should make good use of its local policy tools to meet inelastic demand, as well as demand for improved housing.

Government-subsidised housing should be built at an accelerated pace so as to create a new development model for the real estate market, the conference stated.

“This is a continuation of previous policies that provided financial support for reasonable housing demand, and the conference indicated the sector’s current condition, suggesting the stress on protecting rational demand won’t change,” said Li Yujia, chief researcher at the Guangdong Planning Institute’s residential policy research centre.

According to Li, the conference aimed to highlight both risk prevention and improving livelihoods, to support the proposed new development model for the property market.

A report from the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the country’s central bank, stated on Wednesday that the decline in China’s real estate loans appears to have stabilised as of the end of September as it stayed at the level of August.

The outstanding value of China’s yuan-denominated real estate loans edged down 0.2% year-on-year to 53.19 trillion yuan by the end of the third quarter this year, PBoC data showed. — China Daily/ANN