A national guideline on the management of land will help support a healthy and efficient land supply mechanism to be set up, industry experts said.
The guideline, jointly released by the Ministry of Land and Resources, the Ministry of Finance and the People's Bank of China on Monday, is the first state-level document to deal with a land reserve mechanism. But no date has been set for the guideline to be effective.
"The new guideline, when put into operation, will help governments of all levels to use their land resources in a more planned and sustainable way," Yin Kunhua, a professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics who has done extensive research on the topic for decades, told Shanghai Daily yesterday.
Under the guideline, governments will offer ready-to-develop land to real estate developers and should be responsible for all previous preparations such as relocation of residents and construction of necessary infrastructure. The practice now is that land plots which are not ready for development are usually sold to real estate firms by the governments and developers have to deal with preparation works themselves.
Also, there must not be any uncertainty over the ownership of a ready-to-develop land which should have completed infrastructure in place such as road access, water and power supply, according to the land ministry.
"The new guideline will definitely help the government better control land resources and ensure a stable supply of land to the market," said Xue Jianxiong, head of research at Shanghai Youwin Real Estate Information Service Co Ltd.
"In future, it would be hard for real estate firms to delay or lengthen their development deliberately for higher profit" due to rising housing prices.