New focus will bolster housing market

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 the housing market and help meet reasonable demand, industry experts said on Wednesday.

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

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, the country's central bank, stated on Wednesday that the decline in China's real estate loans appears to have stabilized 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 percent year-on-year to 53.19 trillion yuan ($7.26 trillion) by the end of the third quarter this year, PBOC data showed.

"Attaching great importance to property finance, the meeting has sketched the scope and key areas of current real estate finance work, which will offer very effective guidance to local governments and departments to carry out related work," said Yan Yuejin, director of the Shanghai-based E-house China Research and Development Institution.

"For the first time, improving the entity supervision system of real estate enterprises was mentioned in the conference, which called for speeding up the construction of a supervision system of real estate enterprises, as well as strengthening the supervision of real estate enterprises," said Liu Shui, director of research with the China Index Academy.

This, Liu said, indicates the government will speed up the construction of the real estate enterprise supervision system, clarify the scope of supervision of enterprises and make systemically important enterprises key regulatory objects. The focus of regulatory work should include the supervision of pre-sale funds, corporate debt and liquidity, he said.