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Banks in multiple Chinese cities have launched deferred mortgage repayment services recently to ease the pressure on home buyers who have been impacted by the COVID-19 epidemic, with a maximum extension of 12 months, reports said on Monday.

The cities include Guangzhou in South China's Guangdong Province, Shanghai Municipality and Zhengzhou in Central China's Henan Province, domestic news site guancha.cn reported.

The service is only an offer to individual home buyers. It will be carried out case by case, depending on each client's specific situation and the extension will normally be no longer than six months, reports said.

The People's Bank of China, the nation's central bank, issued a Notice on Strengthening Financial Services for COVID-19 Containment and Socio-Economic Development in April, stating that financial institutions should make flexible changes to the repayment plans for mortgage and other personal loans, such as appropriately deferring the repayment deadlines, extending the loan term, and postponing principal repayment for those who were badly impacted by COVID-19.

According to guancha.cn, many banks have opened portals for related applications and some have also further simplified application procedures or relaxed the requirements.

Some banks in Guangzhou further extended the extension period for 12 months, with application groups being extended to include transportation, catering and entertainment, tourism, offline retail, and other highly affected employees, as well as small and micro business owners, self-employed personnel and farmers.

Yan Yuejin, research director at Shanghai-based E-house China R&D Institute, told the Global Times that the new service in Guangzhou has good coverage which could let more individuals enjoy the preferential policy.

According to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the sales area of residential housing in China reached 1.1 billion square meters from January to October, down 22.3 percent from 2021.

Fu Linghui, a spokesperson for the NBS, said on November 15 that the real estate market has seen some positive changes, as the decline in sales of residential properties and the area of completed housing has narrowed, after local governments implemented targeted policies to ensure housing delivery and promote the stable development of the sector.

Global Times