Housing market Photo:VCG

China's housing market is showing signs of a rebound in both sales and financing, the state broadcaster said on Monday, citing financial management authorities, offering a fresh dose of optimism about sustaining resilience in one of the main pillars of the economy.

The data improvement, adding to repeated avowals made by the banking regulator about ensuring home deliveries in the wake of defaulted mortgage payments, is effectively defusing woes over a downtrend in the property market.

As a raft of policies aimed at stabilizing the economy are implemented, and the domestic epidemic is largely contained, pent-up demand is unleashed, as  the housing market is seeing a ramped-up recovery in sales and fundraising, according to the state broadcaster.

New housing loans saw a conspicuous jump in June over May, continuing an upturn on a monthly basis for the second consecutive month, the state broadcaster said.

New housing lending was estimated to exceed 150 billion yuan ($22.26 billion) in June, underpinned by rising property development loans and personal mortgages.

Buoyed by the data upturn, property developers' shares on both the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong bourses posted an impressive rally on Monday, reversing much of the losses logged over the previous sessions amid concerns over unfinished housing projects. The Monday comeback in property and bank shares led a 1.55 percent gain in the flagship Shanghai Composite Index. The Hang Seng Index jumped 2.7 percent on Monday.

During an interview with the China Banking and Insurance News on Sunday, an unidentified official of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) made a fresh pledge to deal with defaulted mortgage risks.

The CBIRC is keeping a keen eye on the defaults and strengthening coordination with the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development and the People's Bank of China, the central bank, to support local government efforts in guaranteeing home deliveries, the CBIRC official said.

To ensure deliveries to home buyers, banks are urged to strengthen communication with home buyers and meet their varied demands in an individualized manner, as well as to effectively satisfy developers' reasonable financing needs, the official said, voicing optimism that the challenges can be reasonably handled.

The unfinished housing projects as a percentage of the total housing projects are small, and it's believed that land and property-related investment and credit extension and new housing starts would trend upward in the third quarter, Cao Heping, an economist at Peking University, told the Global Times on Monday.

A rebound in home purchases would still be contingent on an improvement in overall consumer sentiment, Cao noted, reckoning home purchases to be back on a brisk growth track by the end of the year if all goes as planned.

Property firms were under pressure from tight funding at large in the first half of the year. In the first six months, property development investment shrank by 5.4 percent to 6.83 trillion yuan, data from the National Bureau of Statistics said on Friday. 

Analysts were hoping for the housing market to stabilize in the third quarter as the economy anchors itself toward a pick-up in growth, following a virus-inflicted slowdown in the second quarter.

The country has been ramping up policies in favor of the housing market on the demand side and it's expected that policy support for property firms' fundraising would increase. This will result in a stabilizing housing market for the third quarter, Geng Xinxin, a senior researcher with the Zhixin Investment Research Institute, said in a research note sent to the Global Times.