Business     

Gov't reaffirms down-payment ratio

Xinhua, January 11, 2010

• The taxation authority should thoroughly investigate tax fraud cases by property developers and severely punish those violators, while the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission should further regulate investment activities by major state-owned enterprises in the property market, according to the notice.

  On speeding up construction of residential housing projects for low-income households, the notice said governments at all levels should strive to help solve the housing problem of 15.4 million low-income urban households by the end of 2012.

  It urged local governments to make more efforts on the renovation of "shanty towns" and increase low-rent houses and affordable houses to low-income families.

  On the fifth and final aspect, the notice said more work needed to be done to improve the working mechanism in which provincial governments should assume general responsibility in stabilizing property market and solving the housing problem for low-income families while city-level governments should take the responsibility of implementing specific measures.

  Local governments should annul any rules in the property market that were in conflict with the macro-control policies adopted by the central government, it said.

  The lengthy notice came after house prices in 70 large and medium-sized Chinese cities rose 5.7 percent year-on-year in November 2009, continuing an escalation which has triggered fresh concerns over property speculation and property bubble in the country.

  The November rise, which was 1.8 percentage points higher than the jump in October, was the ninth straight monthly increase of house prices in the survey of real estate across major Chinese cities.

  China's property market received a blow and began to fall in late 2008 after the global financial crisis crippled China's once-essential exports and the economy as a whole.

  But a series of favorable measures, a credit boom and speculative investment in 2009 had led to a quick recovery of China's property market and price hikes, which started around March 2009.

  Statistics from Goldman Sachs showed that over the past six years, housing price hikes had outpaced income rises by 30 percentage points in Shanghai and 80 percentage points in Beijing.

  In Beijing, the housing price of per square meter is as much as a resident's seven months' salary on average.

  Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told Xinhua in an interview on Dec. 27 that the government would use taxes and mortgage rates to stabilize house prices and take measures to clamp down on house speculation.

  Starting Jan. 1 this year, the government started to reimpose a sales tax on homes sold within five years of their purchase, after cutting the period to two years in January of 2009 to boost the then falling property market.

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