Want a second home in China? Have more kids

Families in China with three children are being allowed to buy a second home, in an effort to boost the nation’s sluggish property market and falling birth rate.

After more than a decade of restricting families to one or two children, the ruling Chinese Communist Party is now confronted with a rapidly ageing society and a population that is due to decline this year.

It has offered families in more than a dozen Chinese cities a range of incentives to have more children, including banning forprofit after-school tuition, extending maternity leave, and offering cash subsidies.

In the latest move, at least 13 cities, including Hangzhou in the east, have announced that households with three or more children will be prioritised when new homes go on sale.

Hangzhou, a tech hub where property prices are usually high, had limited families to owning a single flat.

The new policy is ‘‘worth emulating by other Chinese cities’’, unnamed insiders told the state-run newspaper Securities Times, a signal that it may be extended across the country.

New home sales in China fell by nearly a third in the first quarter of this year compared with 2021, driven in part by a new round of coronavirus lockdowns that kept millions of people indoors. House price growth declined or went into reverse across China’s 100 biggest cities.

Hangzhou’s new housing policy has been trending on Weibo, the Chinese social media site, but has been largely dismissed as of benefit only to the rich.

‘‘Most people cannot afford raising one child and owning one flat, let alone the third child or the second flat,’’ wrote Geng Xiangshun, a Beijing-based blogger with four million followers. ‘‘[This has] nothing to do with ordinary people.’’ – The Times