Under the background of "housing without speculation", China’s long-term rental market has entered a fast lane of development.
From last year, the NPC and CPPCC first proposed "improving the long-term rental policy" and "standardizing the development of the long-term rental market" to this year’s "Government Work Report" clearly stated "accelerating the development of the long-term rental market", the change of this formulation released a clear signal that the long-term rental market has achieved significant development results in the past year and will become an important starting point for safeguarding people’s livelihood stability, promoting consumption growth, stabilizing the real estate market and promoting urbanization in the future.
Among them, especially the development of institutionalized long-term rental housing has become an important working idea for relevant departments to improve the construction of housing rental system and solve urban housing problems. This year’s "Government Work Report" emphasizes "accelerating development", which is more clear and directional, and also highlights the urgency. This is an important leap for the national government to change from cognition to recognition of the development of the housing rental industry, and will also guide and promote the housing rental industry to a high-quality development period.
Affordable rental housing and institutionalized long-term rental housing assume different development functions.
To vigorously develop the housing rental market, it is first clear that the important starting point is to develop rental housing with legal entities, which can be government organizations or enterprise operations, which will help the competent authorities to quickly improve the market management system and solve the problems of information asymmetry, lack of filing of housing and unstable lease period in individual landlords’ rental.
In the process of development, we should adhere to the idea of "policy-oriented and affordable rental housing" and "market-oriented and institutionalized long-term rental housing". With the gradual improvement of the housing rental system, the two should be gradually distinguished and play different functions.
As a kind of welfare policy, the main function of "policy and security rental housing" is to maintain and stabilize the healthy development of society, so it should play a "bottom-up" and "supplementary" role. And "market-oriented, institutionalized long-term rental" should gradually become the main force of the housing rental market, and it should be able to undertake the stock housing of "purchase type" and "own type" in the past to a great extent, so that these houses can return to their proper living attributes and truly produce the proper value of the housing. From this perspective, it is necessary to make market-oriented and institutionalized long-term rental housing the main body, and to cultivate and support specialized and large-scale housing rental enterprises, which is also the key to implementing "staying and not speculating". Only by hierarchical classification and orderly promotion can we comprehensively improve the supply level of rental housing and meet the diversified rental needs of different types of people.
The development experience of market economy has also proved many times that any industry must take the road of institutional development if it wants to establish a certain scale operation ability, and so does the housing rental industry. In this process, the government can give full play to its guiding and supporting role, keep the general direction of people’s livelihood and the general trend of the industry. We should take a more open and inclusive attitude towards market development, "delimit the red line and keep the bottom line" and give professional housing leasing enterprises more autonomy in order to maximize the efficiency of institutionalized management.
Encourage idle housing to be transformed and rented by specialized housing leasing enterprises.
Institutional long-term rental is an important development direction of housing rental industry. On the macro level, we should understand the significance of accelerating the development of long-term rental market from the perspective of the essence of socialist system and improving people’s livelihood during the 14 th Five-Year Plan period, and constantly improve the status of institutionalized long-term rental. At the micro level, professional housing leasing enterprises can establish the reputation of long-term operation, which can effectively unify the demands of both landlords and tenants. Institutionalized long-term rental can not only make tenants consume, choose and move in quickly, but also reduce the management cost of landlords and solve the problems of outdated facilities, aging decoration and mismatched apartment types between supply and demand.
However, in China’s major megacities, the proportion of institutionalized long-term rental is still relatively low, and the market statistics are less than 5%. There is still a lot of room for development and more policy encouragement is needed. The first is policy subsidies. Germany has a good experience for reference. The government subsidizes institutionalized long-term renting, which not only ensures that enterprises can hold houses for a long time and rent them for a long time, but also suppresses the rise of rents, and will not cause tenants to be driven away because it is difficult to pay rents. Combined with China’s national conditions, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development can, in conjunction with local governments, select a number of representative and large-scale housing leasing enterprises to be included in the key support scope of the government, give them policy and financial support, and enable them to play a leading role in scale and undertake more functions to alleviate urban housing problems.
Secondly, it is necessary to increase the market share of institutionalized long-term rental housing in big cities, especially in places with large population inflow and large demand for rental housing. For example, in Beijing, for a long time in the past, urban development interacted with the "house-buying economy". At that time, many property buyers took a fancy to value-added space and bought houses in the suburbs of the city. With the acceleration of urbanization, the outward agglomeration of high-tech industrial zones has driven the inflow of talents, resulting in a large number of rental demand. Therefore, under the general tone of "living without speculation", in areas with large rental demand, individual landlords with idle houses should be encouraged to rent, especially entrusted to specialized housing rental enterprises. On the one hand, it can stabilize the fluctuation of rental market caused by demand growth, and play the role of institutionalized long-term rental to stabilize rents and stabilize the market; On the other hand, filing by enterprises facilitates the unified management of the government and can prevent the emergence of a "gray" zone of supervision.
"Accelerating the development of long-term rental market" is the key to meet the rigid demand for housing and form a healthy ecology of "rent" and "housing" in the next period.
For housing rental enterprises, first, they should be aware of their corporate social responsibilities with prudence, seek development based on the long term, and constantly provide higher quality residential products and life services. The second is to give full play to the role of institutionalized long-term rental, give full play to professional advantages in management, operation and efficiency, and contribute to the government’s "alleviating housing problems in big cities" quickly and efficiently. Third, large-scale representative enterprises should play a leading role, constantly expand their business boundaries based on leasing functions, and form an industrial matrix of "rental products, rental services, rental industry Internet, and rental living areas integration".
For the government, the first is to improve tax, financial and land support policies, inject "new kinetic energy" into the development of long-term rental housing, and accelerate the structural reform of housing supply side. Second, in the construction of urban leasing system, we should enhance the participation of housing leasing enterprises, so as to quickly improve the government-guided and market-oriented housing leasing system. The third is to advocate institutional development with an open attitude, so that institutions can give full play to the advantages of specialization, scale and service refinement, and help the housing leasing industry to be stable and far-reaching
The author is Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, member of the Standing Committee, and President of China Institute of Economic Thought and Practice, Tsinghua University.