The top housing ministry is mulling measures, including financial subsidies, to encourage farmers and migrant workers to buy homes in smaller cities where unsold inventory is stockpiling, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

Citing anonymous sources, Economic Information Daily, a Xinhua-affiliated newspaper, reported that the Ministry of Housing and Urban-rural Development was creating the plan to promote home purchases in China’s third and fourth-tier cities that have an excess of homes for sale.

The plan includes subsidies, tax breaks and mortgage interest subsidies, the newspaper reported. It said the ministry also was considering including farmers and migrant workers in the Housing Provident Fund, a low-mortgage rate program designed for urban employees.

The report echoed a previous Bloomberg report that China plans to encourage small and mid-sized cities to offer rural residents subsidies and tax cuts to buy first homes in urban areas.

Local governments are already making such moves. The government in Fuyang district, in the eastern city of Hangzhou, will give each buyer at least 1 percent of the value of a home after the purchase, it said in an official account on the social media site Weibo on Wednesday.

On Dec. 3, the Puyang city government in central Henan province started to subsidize farmers purchasing new homes in the city, according to a statement on its website. Farmers will receive cash of 150 yuan per square meter for their first purchase, and 100 yuan per square meter for a second purchase.

According to an estimate by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there are 2.1 billion square meters of excessive finished and unfinished homes across China that could take 6.5 years to sell out.