Banks must provide loans to first-home buyers, the People's Bank of China (PBOC) said in a statement on Tuesday, the first clear call to support mortgage lending since starting a policy tightening cycle to calm the property market two years ago.

But there is no sign that Beijing is ready to put into full reverse the tightening measures that curb property speculation, with Premier Wen Jiabao saying in a cabinet meeting at the end of January that he wanted to see a pull-back in home prices to a reasonable level.

"I don't think it indicates a major policy shift as previous tightening policies are mostly targeted at speculation," said Dongming Xie, China economist at OCBC Bank.

Li Shaoming, a property analyst with China Investment Securities in Beijing, said the latest statement from the central bank was a fine-tuning of China's property policy.

"The central bank will possibly issue further details or instruct banks to offer mortgage rate discounts for first-time home buyers via window guidance as the next step," Li said.

Chinese banks lent 1.26 trillion yuan ($199.7 billion) to the property sector in 2011, including mortgage loans and loans to developers, which was 770.4 billion yuan less than in 2010, the central bank said.

The proportion of first home buyers in China's overall property market is uncertain, but Li said the modest relaxation announced by the central bank would not change the downward direction home prices in major cities have followed since October.

"Expectations on home price falls will not easily reverse, as there are still huge amounts of inventory and not so many first-time home buyers in China," Li said.

Apart from the first-home buyer policy, the central bank also said that banks should aid the economy's weak points, notably the agricultural sector and areas that are vital to people's living.

In the statement on PBOC website (www.pbc.gov.cn), the central bank said that China will push forward asset securitisation in 2012 and will encourage the development of "safe, simple and appropriate" financial derivatives.

Analysts expect the central bank to ease policy in the coming months by cutting the required ratio of reserves (RRR) that banks must hold to free more funds for lending, after cutting RRR by 50 basis points at the end of November from a record 21.5 percent.

Many had forecast a cut before China's Lunar New Year holidays, but were wrong-footed by the central bank which has opted to use open market operations to inject liquidity into the banking system instead to meet near-term demands for cash.

China's policymakers are looking for ways to cushion the world's second-largest economy from the global economic downturn that avoid expanding credit too quickly that could find its way into speculative investments.

Policy fine-tuning to support growth, launched in the autumn of 2011, has focused more on cutting taxes and red tape for the small businesses that provide about 75 percent of the jobs in China.