China property stocks jump after Beijing proposes measures to lift troubled sector

China property stocks jumped Monday after Beijing layed out more support measures over the weekend to shore up the troubled sector.

While the Hang Seng Index was last down 0.4% in volatile trading Monday, the Hang Seng Mainland Properties Index rose over 2%.

China Resources Land was the top mover in the HSMPI, rising 7.6%.

Shares of other real estate developers also saw significant gains, including China Overseas Land & Investment and Yuexiu Property gaining nearly 7% and 6%, respectively.

Real estate was also the leading gainer in Mainland China’s CSI 300, advancing nearly 5%, while the broader index was up 2%.

The rally came after China’s Ministry of Finance outlined new policy measures focused on stabilizing the beleaguered real estate sector.

Senior officials said at a highly anticipated press conference on Saturday that local governments will be allowed to issue more special bonds to buy land and unsold housing inventories from developers.

This policy is designed to regulate the supply-demand balance in the land market, reduce idle land and alleviate financing pressures on local governments and developers, said Tommy Xie, managing director and head of Asia Macro Research at OCBC Bank said in a note on Monday.

This “represents another attempt” by the government to absorb the country’s unsold housing inventory, Leonard Law, a senior credit analyst at Lucror Analytics told CNBC, but he suggested that it’s unclear if there could be sufficient market incentives for local governments to carry cout these measures.

Investor sentiment may rise in the near term on the back of Beijing’s policy focus, Law added, while cautioning that investors need to wait for more details on the implementation of the plans.

The view is shared by economists at Goldman Sachs, who said in a research note on Monday that the incremental policy changes are likely to have limited effects at addressing property destocking, “until implementation bottlenecks” are addressed.

Such hurdles include the cases where local governments and developers do not agree on transaction prices, it added.

The property market’s drag to GDP growth is likely to remain large into 2025, Goldman Sachs economists said, as “construction activity catches down to leading indicators such as land sales and property starts.”

China’s President Xi Jinping in late September led a meeting that pledged to “halt the real estate market decline and spur a stable recovery,” according to CNBC’s translation of the meeting’s readout.

The high-level meeting chaired-by Xi came after the country’s central bank announced to cut the mortgage rates on individual loans to relieve homeowners’ financial burdens.

Major cities across China have moved to relax a string of property purchase restrictions to spur demand.

China’s real estate sector still grapples with large inventory of unsold units and unfinished projects. Analysts have insisted that China needs to clean up the inventories to really turn around home buyers’ confidence.

The Vice Minister of Finance Liao Min added at the Saturday briefing that authorities were also considering plans to reduce real estate-related taxes. He did not name specific figures and noted supporting real estate required multiple policies.