The Chinese city of Xiamen, where home price gains led the nation last month, plans to ban some buyers from purchasing homes, joining larger hubs in trying to cool soaring property prices.
Xiamen is to suspend sales of homes to local buyers who already own two residences and to non-residents who already own one, it said in a statement yesterday on the city’s land resources and real-estate management bureau Web site.
The new regulations are to take effect from Monday next week to the end of next year.
The new home purchase curbs apply to residences smaller than 144m2 in area, the statement said.
Home prices in Xiamen rose 4.6 percent in July, the biggest increase among 70 cities tracked by the government, after climbing 4.7 percent the previous month. They have jumped 38 percent in the past year, a record for the city.
In Shanghai, home prices gained 1.4 percent in July, while those in the southern business hub of Shenzhen increased 2 percent, cooling from earlier levels after the cities unveiled curbs in March designed to deter speculative purchases.
Xiamen stepped up tightening measures imposed in July, when the city government raised mortgage downpayment requirements for some second homes to 60 percent from 40 percent.
Earlier this month, Nanjing, Jiangsu’s provincial capital, and Suzhou, a regional manufacturing base, also raised downpayment requirements for some buyers of second residences, adding to restrictions introduced in Hefei, the provincial capital of Anhui.
“It’s a signal that more tightening is looming,” said Zhang Hongwei (張宏偉), a research director at Shanghai-based Tospur Real Estate Consulting Co (同策房產咨詢). “More large second-tier cities are likely to impose housing curbs, either raising downpayment thresholds or introducing home-buying bans.”
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