South China's Guangzhou City yesterday unveiled its rules to restrict home purchases, becoming the latest city in the country to implement such bans following a central government call to rein in soaring housing prices.

Effective today, local families who have one home only and non-local households who do not own a home now but are capable of proving their residence for an accumulative 12 months over the past two years in Guangzhou will be allowed to buy one more property.

But local families who already have two or more houses and non-locals who have one will be banned from buying any more.

Non-locals who cannot provide tax or social insurance certificates to prove their length of stay won't be allowed to buy homes in the capital of Guangdong Province, according to an official document released yesterday by the city government.

The latest home-purchase restriction in Guangzhou, rather similar to what has been implemented in Shanghai, is much more lenient compared with an earlier announced ban in Beijing.

In the country's capital city, non-local families need to provide tax or social insurance certificates to show their residence in the city for five consecutive years so as to qualify to buy a home if they don't own any home at the moment, the Beijing city government announced last week.

A couple of Chinese cities have recently announced detailed regulations to restrict home purchases in the same effort to curb housing speculation.

The governments of Nanchang, Jinan and Yinchuan, all provincial and autonomous regional capitals, prohibited new home purchases by locally-registered families who already own two or more homes and non-local registered families who own at least one home.

Nanchang and Jinan also banned non-local registered families with no documents certifying they have paid social security or income tax for one year from buying property.