Home purchasing restrictions outdated

A view of a property project under construction in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. LONG WEI/FOR CHINA DAILY After Hangzhou and Xi'an annulled their restrictions on nonlocal residents buying homes last week, only Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Haikou are still carrying out the policy that was introduced about 10 years ago with the aim of checking the bubbling of the housing market then. To reboot the lackluster real estate market, which concerns many upstream and downstream industries, investment, consumption, national financial security and government revenue, it is projected that these cities will also adjust their restrictive policies in the near future. Therefore the policymakers urgently need to release effective purchasing power, activate housing market transactions, hedge against declining demand, restore market momentum, and stabilize price signals and market expectations. The following factors should also be taken into account: the low birth rate, the aging and shrinking of the population, the reduction in residents' savings rate, the unemployment situation, the downward pressure on the economy, and that many migrant workers and college graduates have already moved from the big cities to small and medium-sized towns and to their hometowns in rural areas where home purchase restrictions were never imposed.