Real estate market regulation continues to release "major moves" across various regions.

On October 16th, Tianjin issued the "Notice of the General Office of the Tianjin Municipal People's Government on Forwarding the Measures of the Municipal Housing and Urban-Rural Development Commission and other six departments on Further Optimizing Real Estate Policies to Better Meet the Reasonable Housing Needs of Residents," announcing the cancellation of restrictive measures on housing.

The "Notice" proposes to cancel restrictive measures on the purchase and transfer of newly-built commercial housing and second-hand housing in the city. It will no longer guide the upper limit of sales prices for newly-built commercial housing. At the same time, the standards for ordinary and non-ordinary housing in the city will be abolished.

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After the comprehensive cancellation of purchase restrictions, both residents with Tianjin household registration and those without can purchase housing (including new and second-hand houses) throughout the city. Non-resident households also do not need to provide证明材料such as tax payment or social security certificates for home purchase qualification.

From a national perspective, only Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and some cities in Hainan still retain some purchase restrictions.

"Tianjin's move to cancel residential purchase restrictions is in line with the current macro trend of real estate market regulation. It is expected to have a positive impact on the supply and demand relationship, transaction activity, and market expectations," said Niu Xiaohui, a senior analyst at the Tianjin branch of the China Index Academy.

The cancellation of the resale restriction policy is due to a policy introduced by Tianjin in 2020, which allowed employees with non-local household registration introduced by enterprises to enjoy the same treatment as citizens when purchasing homes. At the same time, it required that the purchased housing could only be transferred after obtaining the property certificate for three years. After this policy adjustment, the restriction on the transfer of purchased housing is lifted, and there is no longer a holding time limit.

In addition, as the proportion of improvement projects in Tianjin's market is increasing, the new policy announced that it will no longer guide the upper limit of sales prices for newly-built commercial housing, allowing commercial housing to return to its commodity attributes and encouraging real estate development enterprises to build more quality houses.

Tianjin's "package" policy also involves non-ordinary housing issues. The original standard for ordinary housing in the city was a residential area with a floor area ratio of 1.0 or above, and a single housing area of 144 square meters or less. After the cancellation of this standard, there will be no distinction between ordinary and non-ordinary housing, which will help reduce development costs and alleviate the housing purchase burden on resident families.

"Tianjin's policy is similar to other cities across the country. In terms of restrictive measures, it has canceled the resale restriction policy, ordinary housing standards, and price limit measures, reflecting the orientation of market-oriented transactions. It also meets the current demands of real estate transactions and has a positive effect on reducing transaction costs and stimulating transaction efficiency," said Yan Yuejin, deputy dean of the Shanghai Yiju Real Estate Research Institute.It is worth noting that the new policy is also making concerted efforts in financial policy. First, commercial personal housing loans no longer distinguish between first and second homes, with the minimum down payment ratio unified at no less than 15%. Second, the pricing of personal housing loan interest rates is optimized to guide commercial banks to steadily and orderly carry out the batch adjustment of existing housing loan interest rates. Third, the role of the real estate financing coordination mechanism is played, and according to market-oriented and rule-of-law principles, the loan issuance for real estate "white list" projects is increased according to the law.

Niu Xiaohui said that in recent years, against the background of the deep adjustment of the real estate market, the demand structure of the Tianjin residential market has shown a trend of gathering towards the core area, and the transaction area ratio of newly built commercial residential buildings in the six urban districts has expanded for four consecutive years. Under this background, the cancellation of purchase restrictions and the reduction of down payment ratios in the six urban districts will effectively stimulate the potential demand of out-of-town homebuyers and local improvement-type homebuyers, thereby injecting new vitality into the market, enhancing the liquidity and activity of the market.

Yan Yuejin said that Tianjin's new policy in financial policy has played a positive role in reducing the capital costs for homebuyers and real estate companies. "Overall, this policy further indicates that in the fourth quarter, real estate policies in various places will continue to exert efforts and continue to help the real estate market stop falling and stabilize. Coupled with the recent good market sentiment, it has also greatly promoted the recovery of market confidence."

Since this year, Tianjin has successively introduced the 430 new policy, actively implemented the 5.17 policy, the 929 new policy, etc., to reduce the purchase threshold for residents' families, reduce repayment pressure, and better meet the rigid and improvement housing needs of residents.

From the perspective of the real estate market transaction, according to the monitoring data of the China Index Research Institute, in the third quarter of 2024, Tianjin's commercial residential supply was 1.927 million square meters (17,163 sets), a year-on-year decrease of nearly 20%. The transaction was 1.646 million square meters (14,954 sets), a year-on-year decrease of 14%. In September 2024, Tianjin's commercial residential transaction was 606,600 square meters, a month-on-month increase of 14.83%.

Since the National Day holiday, the Tianjin real estate market has shown a significant warming trend. According to statistics from the CRIC Tianjin agency, during the 7-day National Day holiday, the city's total visits were 38,723 groups, with an average of 136 groups per single plate, which is about twice the average number of visits per single plate in the past two months. The total number of subscriptions was 3,618 sets, with an average of 12.7 sets, which is 3.3 times the average number of subscriptions per single plate in the past two months.

After the holiday, the large-scale marketing actions of each plate have decreased, and the hot-selling projects are still mainly based on the previous price adjustment projects or high cost-performance ratio projects in the region. From the market performance, the total number of visits in the city after the festival was 17,120 groups, which exceeded the weekly average of 2024 by 22%, and the number of subscriptions was 1,093 sets, which exceeded the weekly average of 2024 by 15%.