Minister: Property market to remain stable in Q4

Wang Menghui, Secretary of the Party Leadership Group and Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, answers questions from the press in Beijing on Oct 22, 2017. [Photo by Edmond Tang/China Daily]

China's property market is expected to continue stabilizing in the fourth quarter of this year, said Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development Wang Menghui on Sunday.

The real estate sector will continue to see slower growth in transaction volume and prices will stabilize, Wang told a news conference on the sidelines of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

Wang said the market will stick to the idea that housing is for people's residential purposes, not for speculation, and the authorities have been launching a slew of city-specific measures to ensure stable and steady growth of the market.

Currently home prices in first-and-second-tier cities have slowed down, while prices in the third-and-fourth-tier cities have stayed stable.

The government will not waver in its efforts to implement property market regulation and will maintain continuity and stability of policies, Wang said.

He pledged to move faster to put in place a system that ensures supply through multiple sources, provides housing support through various channels, and encourages both housing purchase and renting.

The ministry has been piloting residential leasing projects in 12 cities across China, and supporting Beijing and Shanghai to actively explore measures for building more new homes with the ownership rights shared by both the government and the property buyers, or the model of joint property rights housing.

"The housing authorities have been speeding up the process of making policies to support long-term mechanism for steady and stable growth of the real estate market, including law-making for regulating residential leasing market," said Wang.