BEIJING (AFP) — China announced a range of measures to boost the nation's ailing real estate market amid global financial turmoil, state media said Wednesday, quoting the finance ministry and the central bank.
The moves to help home buyers comes after a Cabinet meeting last week which resolved to take steps to lift the slowing sector and head off a market crash after recent data showed a drop in China's property prices.
Stamp tax on property purchases and value-added tax of land on property sales will be lifted from November 1, Xinhua said, quoting the finance ministry.
The People's Bank of China said minimum deposits for first-time home buyers would be slashed from October 27, the news agency said, citing a circular from the central bank released late Wednesday.
Interest rates on mortgages for first-time home buyers would be cut by 27 basis points to boost domestic consumption, it also said.
China has already taken other recent stimulus steps to ward off the effects of the global financial crisis, including cutting its benchmark one-year lending rate by 27 basis points to 6.93 percent on October 8.
China said earlier this week its economic growth slowed to nine percent in the third quarter as a world slowdown started taking its toll.
It marked the first time since late 2005 that quarterly growth slipped into single digits and was the lowest growth figure since the second quarter of 2003.
The data provided the most powerful indication yet that even China's so-far invincible economy was not insulated from the global downturn, especially as fears of recession grow in the United States and Europe -- key markets for Chinese manufactured goods.
Real estate prices in 70 major Chinese cities fell 0.1 percent in August from July, the first month-on-month price decline since China began releasing the data in July 2005.
A sagging property market is likely to place further pressure on China's economy because investment in the real estate sector accounts for more than 20 percent of the country's urban fixed-asset investment.
Local-level authorities in several parts of the country already had taken a range of steps to boost the real estate market, including preferential terms for home buyers and loosening rules on how long developers can take to get projects finished.
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