Residents select houses at a sales center of a real estate company in Huaian, East China's Jiangsu Province on Sunday. As China's domestic coronavirus control has made progress, local real estate companies have opened while observing strict measures against the virus. Photo: cnsphotos

During the May Day holidays, more than 10 Chinese cities, including Wuxi, Lianyungang and Xuzhou in East China's Jiangsu Province as well as Yueyang in Central China's Hubei, rolled out various policies, including lower down payment ratios for home purchases and relaxation of sales restrictions, to further stabilize the real estate market.

The moves followed a top leadership meeting on April 29, which sent more positive signals for stabilizing the real estate industry and supporting localities to improve their real estate policies to meet housing demand.

Industry insiders said that given the tone of the meeting, localities will further relax restrictions on home purchases. Local governments will also actively follow up on policies to support enterprises' reasonable financing needs and optimize the supervision of pre-sale funds.

Xuzhou announced a series of policies, including cutting interest rates on mortgages and encouraging financial institutions to reduce the down payment ratio for first-time buyers.

The local government is striving to help developers by increasing support for project loans and M&A loans, and actively extending and renewing loans to troubled enterprises to relieve their capital pressure.

Meizhou, Lianyungang and Yueyang also announced support measures. Meizhou reduced the down payment ratio for the housing provident fund for second-time home buyers to 20 percent, while Lianyungang confirmed that the down payment ratio for first homes stood at 20 percent.

Yueyang said that buyers who purchase their first homes in the urban area and complete the deed tax payment will receive 10,000 yuan ($1,511) of subsidies each.

Ganzhou, East China's Jiangxi, raised the maximum amount of housing provident fund loans to 600,000 yuan, and the age of home buyers was extended to 70 years.

"The moves reflected localities' urgency and initiative to boost the property market, especially during the golden week of property sales," Yan Yuejin, research director at Shanghai-based E-house China R&D Institute, told the Global Times on Thursday.

However, data from the China Index Academy showed that during the five-day holidays, the new commercial residential transaction area in key cities fell 52.3 percent year-on-year, reflecting shrinking demand due to the new wave of the epidemic.

Yan noted that all these central and local government moves will contribute to boosting the real estate market in May, suggesting that the authorities closely track the market situation, accelerate the release of supporting measures and lift restrictive policies.