(Bloomberg) -- China unveiled its biggest package yet to shore up its beleaguered property market, lowering borrowing costs on as much as $5.3 trillion in mortgages and easing down-payment requirements for second home purchases to a historical low.
The People’s Bank of China will cut outstanding mortgage rates for individual borrowers by an average of 0.5 percentage point, Governor Pan Gongsheng said at a press conference on Tuesday. The minimum down-payment ratio on second home purchases will be lowered to 15% from 25%.
The plan, confirming earlier reports by Bloomberg News, underscores Beijing’s urgency to stem a housing-led slowdown in Asia’s largest economy as it faces the prospect of increasing protectionism and a shaky global outlook. The moves comes as economists at banks including UBS Group AG, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. predicted that China will fall short of delivering on its growth target this year.
The PBOC didn’t specify whether the mortgage refinancing plan this year will apply to first-home purchasers only, which would be the same as its first reduction a year earlier, or expand to also include second-home buyers. Mortgage rates for purchasing second homes are much higher than for first homes.
Homeowners will be able to renegotiate terms with their current lenders first, Governor Pan said. Regulators will then consider whether to allow borrowers to refinance with a different bank, he added. Mortgage refinancing between banks, if later approved, would be the first time since the global financial crisis and would likely ramp up competition among lenders.
Separately, the PBOC will ramp up its re-lending program for state-owned firms to acquire unsold property inventories. It will now provide 100% of the principal of bank loans for such purchases, up from 60% announced in May, Pan said.
A Bloomberg Intelligence gauge of Chinese property developer shares rose 4.6% on Tuesday, though it’s still down 31% from this year’s high in mid-May. Dollar bonds issued by developers were little changed Tuesday morning, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“This package is China’s biggest and widest supporting measures on home loans yet, as it covers both new home-buying and outstanding purchases,” said Yan Yuejin, vice president of Shanghai E-house’s research arm.
Policymakers have taken forceful steps to lower financing costs this year including scrapping a central government-guided mortgage rate floor for first home purchases. But such moves have mostly benefited new property buyers, exacerbating the disparity with existing homeowners that has driven a wave of early mortgage repayments and strained lenders in recent years.
Currently, existing mortgages carry an average interest rate of about 4%, compared with 3.2% on newly issued loans for a first home and 3.5% for a second home, according to data compiled by China Real Estate Information Corp. in late August.
The move will ease mortgage burdens for an estimated 150 million people, cutting their annual interest expenses by about 150 billion yuan ($21 billion), Pan said. While China has pushed average mortgage costs to a record low this year, most households haven’t benefited because banks won’t reprice existing loans until next year.
Still, it will likely add pressure on the nation’s biggest banks, which have been struggling with record low margins, sinking profits and rising bad loans.
Pan said the new round of interest-rate adjustments will have a neutral impact on bank profits and margins, given that more funding is freed up and deposit rates will follow suit. Officials also announced on Tuesday they would boost capital to the largest lenders for the first time in more than a decade, to help them battle with eroding profits and capital shortfalls.
Banks have resorted to multiple deposit rate cuts to mitigate the impact of lower loan rates. Combined profits at China’s commercial lenders rose 0.4% in the first half, the slowest pace since 2020, according to official data. The sector’s net interest margins have continued to decline, hitting a record low of 1.54% at the end of June, well below the 1.8% threshold regarded as necessary to maintain reasonable profitability.
The reduction to the minimum down-payment ratio for second-home buyers follows a sizable cut to 25% in May. Top regulators have said China will support homebuyers seeking to upgrade to bigger homes.
Market watchers warned that the basket of policies is far from enough to revive the real estate sector and economy.
“The package a step in the right direction, compared with the previous drip-feeding support,” said Julian Evans-Pritchard, head of China economics at Capital Economics. “But it will probably be insufficient to drive a turnaround in growth unless followed up with greater fiscal support.”
Given downbeat sentiment, households are unlikely to be swayed to take on a larger mortgage to acquire a second property when price momentum is still trending downward, said Lynn Song, chief economist for Greater China at ING Bank NV.
The higher portion of PBOC financing for the property destocking initiative also won’t be enough to significantly improve its takeup until more fiscal subsidies are provided, Evans-Pritchard cautioned.
China’s real estate crisis is now into its fourth year with no signs of letting up. The slump in home sales deepened in August as the impact of policy loosening measures waned and buyers were deterred by expectations for prices to keep falling.
“For a recovery of the property market, two things need to happen: First, we need to see prices stabilize, if not recover. Second, we need to see excess housing inventories come down toward historical norms,” ING’s Song said. “Until then, the drag on growth will continue.”
--With assistance from Zheng Li.
(Updates with analysts’ comments in the last six paragraphs)
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