Chinese cities enact policies to boost population and housing market

Several Chinese cities have relaxed restrictions on home purchases for families with multiple children in order to encourage people to have more kids and boost the property market.

On Tuesday, Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province, released a notification to improve its regulation on the housing market, providing preferential policies for families with three kids.

These families can now buy one more home under the city's house-purchasing restrictions, and be prioritized in applying for newly built homes in a lottery-like purchase scheme.

Hangzhou is not the first city that relaxed such restrictions for multiple-child families this month. A few days earlier, Jiangsu's Nanjing and Yangzhou, Guangdong's Dongguan and Liaoning's Shenyang started to allow families with three children to buy one more home.

Other cities in provinces like Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Hunan and Jiangxi have enacted housing policies to meet the needs of multiple-child families as well.

According to Chen Wenjing, market research director of the China Index Academy's index division, in addition to relaxing home-purchase restrictions, these preferential policies also feature lower down payments, subsidies and increasing amount of provident fund loans to better align with new population policies. Chen believes more cities will issue similar policies in the future.

Li Yujia, chief researcher at the Guangdong Housing Policy Research Center, said these policies will serve some families' need for larger houses when they have more children.

Yan Yuejin, research director of Shanghai-based E-house China Research and Development Institution, thinks the combination of preferential policies on housing and increased childbearing can promote both sales in the housing market and fertility.