Policy may cap soaring home prices

Tighter policies to regulate soaring housing prices in some red-hot cities are in the pipeline, industry analysts said.

"In the second half of the year, deleveraging from the houses purchased with high debt will become mainstream policy in cities such as Hangzhou and Tianjin where prices are rising too fast," Centaline Property chief analyst Zhang Dawei wrote in a research note on Friday.

Suzhou and Nanjing, two cities in Jiangsu province where home prices topped the list of the month-on-month growth rates for the past several months, started to tighten credit policy by increasing the down payment ratio for homebuyers, according to a government statement on Thursday.