China’s top banking regulators have convened a key meeting on real estate finance in the wake of the debt crisis of property giant Evergrande Group.
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) and the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) convened a real estate finance work meeting on 29 September.
The meeting stressed that regulators would “grasp and effectively implement the real estate finance macro-prudential regulatory system with a focus on the three targets of stabilising land prices, stabilising housing prices and stabilising expectations.”
PBOC and CBIRC also reiterated their commitment to the position that “housings are for occupation, not speculation,” and said that they were firmly committed to “not making real estate a short-term economic stimulus measure.” Authorities will continue to “effectively implement long-term effective real estate mechanisms and accelerate improvements to the residential rental housing finance policy system.”
The meeting also called for financial institutions to “cooperate with relevant authorities and local governments to jointly uphold the stable, healthy development of real estate markets and uphold the lawful rights and interests of residential housing consumers, in accordance with the principles of the rule of law and marketisation.”
PBOC’s monetary policy committee previously called for “upholding the stable, healthy development of real estate markets and upholding the lawful rights and interests of residential housing consumers” at its quarterly meeting held on 24 September, marking the first time that the phrase was used by banking regulators.
Yan Yue (严跃) from the Shanghai E-house Real Estate Research Institute said to state-owned media that regulators are calling for commercial banks to both provide a guarantee of reasonable consumer demand for real estate during the process of controlling their own real estate loan concentration ratios, which entered the purview of official regulation at the end of last year.
