Three weeks ago, Guangzhou restaurant worker Chen Gaolei stepped from her dilapidated inner-city flat before dawn to obtain a form that could change the way in which she and her family live.
Ms Chen was one of more than 8,000 people who crowded the city's Real Estate Mansion to apply for the chance to buy one of more than 900 recently completed economy, or anju, flats.
It was not the first time Guangzhou had released economy housing. Since 1995, the city has offered more than 26,000 anju flats, but last month's release marked a milestone because municipal banks for the first time agreed to help the city's working classes buy homes through the use of home mortgages.
'It certainly makes a difference,' Ms Chen said. 'Without a mortgage, we couldn't afford to buy.' Financing home purchases through the use of collateral-based mortgages is a relatively recent development in the mainland. Home mortgage-lending returned to the mainland only in the late 1980s to make it easier for overseas Chinese and foreigners to buy local property.
Home mortgages for mainland residents became available nearly a decade later on an experimental basis in 35 key cities, and then was offered only to the wealthiest citizens by a handful of branches of the China Construction Bank (CCB). It was only in April last year that the People's Bank of China expanded mortgage-lending services to all state commercial banks in 223 cities throughout the country.
Sun Shanming, CCB's Guangzhou branch deputy chief in charge of mortgage-lending, said the increased professionalism and institutionalisation of the mortgage-lending service had allowed mainland commercial banks to offer mortgages to the masses.
