Curb rising land prices

The Beijing municipal government introduced new measures on Friday to cool the capital's red-hot real estate market.

Higher down-payment requirements for those buying a second property in the capital are expected to further squeeze speculative home purchases.

The tighter regulations came only two days after the governments in Nanjing and Qingdao, two major Eastern cities that have witnessed fast rises in property prices in the past year, tightened their housing regulations.

According to this year's Government Work Report delivered by Premier Li Keqiang, differentiated regulatory approaches will be adopted, with policies applied in some major cities to contain the fast rise in housing prices, while policies to encourage house buying will be applied in third- and fourth-tier cities that have huge inventories of unsold housing.

Since 2014, the authorities have launched numerous rounds of housing market regulations, but property prices in some cities have continually rebounded quickly after every round of tightened regulations. Signs of property prices rising fast in Shanghai and other major cities in recent months mean that housing market regulations adopted by local authorities over the past year may once again come to nothing if no resolute measures are taken.

The latest round of housing market regulations is expected to be applied for a longer term, especially after the top authorities made it clear that houses are for living in, not for speculation. However, if the authorities are to really put the brakes on rising property prices, their efforts should focus more on checking the rising land prices and increasing the supply of land. Without controlling land prices and increasing the supply of land for sale, it will be difficult to stabilize home prices in the long run with temporary home purchase restrictions.