CHINA’S southern Xiamen City, where home price gains led the nation in July, banned some buyers from purchasing homes, joining larger hubs in trying to cool soaring property prices.

    Xiamen, a port city in eastern Fujian Province, will suspend selling homes to local buyers who already own two residences, and will ban non-residents from buying a second house, it said in a statement yesterday on the city’s land resources and real estate management bureau website. Curbs will be effective from Sept. 5 to the end of 2017. The newly unveiled home purchase curbs apply to residences smaller than 144 square meters in area, according to the statement.

    Home prices in Xiamen rose 4.6 percent in July, the biggest increase among 70 cities tracked by the government, after climbing 4.7 percent the previous month. They’ve jumped 38 percent in the past year, a record for the city.

    In Shanghai, home prices gained 1.4 percent in July, and they increased 2 percent in Shenzhen, cooling from earlier levels after the cities unveiled curbs in March designed to deter speculative purchases.

    Xiamen stepped up tightening imposed in July, when the city government raised mortgage downpayment requirements for some second homes to 60 percent from 40 percent. Earlier last month, Nanjing, Jiangsu’s provincial capital, and Suzhou, a regional manufacturing base, also raised down-payment requirements for some buyers of second residences, adding to restrictions introduced in Hefei, the provincial capital of Anhui.

    “It’s a signal that more tightening is looming,” said Zhang Hongwei, a research director at Shanghai-based Tospur Real Estate Consulting Co. “More large second-tier cities are likely to impose housing curbs, either raising downpayment thresholds or introducing home-buying bans.”

    In another development, Shanghai’s housing department issued a statement late Monday in response to what it called a recent “rumor” on new policies to restrict lending for home purchases.

    Shanghai hasn’t studied further lending curbs to cool its soaring property market, the housing department of the city government said.

    City authorities said they will continue to follow lending curbs announced March 25 to “ensure healthy and stable development” of the city’s real estate market, according to a statement on its microblog late Monday.

    Shanghai is preparing to discuss a fresh round of curbs aimed at combating surging property prices, including potential restrictions on mortgages and loans to developers, people familiar with the matter said last week. Home prices in China’s second-biggest city climbed 27 percent in July from a year earlier.

    Beijing and Tianjin are also contemplating new measures to rein in prices, people familiar with the matter said last week. Those cities haven’t issued similar statements denying that they are studying measures to cool prices.(SD-Agencies)