(Yicai) Jan. 31 -- Shanghai is continuing to ease its curbs on house purchases, as the eastern Chinese megacity allowed unmarried non-permanent residents to buy homes in suburban areas.

Non-local residents who have paid social security or personal income taxes in Shanghai for more than five years in a row will be allowed to buy one apartment outside of the outer ring expressway, except for Chongming island, regardless of whether they are married or not, the Shanghai Municipal Commission of Housing and Urban-rural Development announced yesterday. Before this change, only non-local residents who were married were allowed to buy in the city.

Shanghai has 16 districts, of which four are outside the ring expressway, four are inside, and eight are only partly inside. Nearly 70 percent of Shanghai’s total house transactions happened in the outer ring last year, with the figure dropping to 50 percent for second-hand homes, according to statistics from real estate agency Centaline Property.

Many unmarried migrant workers in Shanghai will directly qualify to buy houses in the city with the new policy, said Yan Yuejin, research director of the E-House China Research and Development Institute.

The new policy will release some purchasing power, helping some popular housing projects near the outer ring to be sold first, according to industry insiders. The person responsible for a housing project in the suburban Jiading district told Yicai that he started receiving customer inquiries as soon as the new policy was unveiled.

Most of Shanghai’s industrial areas are in the suburbs, so buying houses there can help workers achieve a job-housing balance, Lu Wenxi, senior market analyst at Centaline, told Yicai. Moreover, there are many houses priced below CNY6 million (USD835,670) in the suburbs, which would help people with limited budgets to buy houses or improve their existing living conditions, Lu added.

However, Chinese New Year is a traditional off-season for house trading, so the new policy will begin to show results only from March, Lu said. The new policy is expected to make people more willing to buy houses and lay foundations for the real estate market in Shanghai to pick up this year, Lu noted.

Editor: Futura Costaglione