China’s Property Rally Fizzles After September Rebound
By Liu Qingyi and Wang Jing
China’s leading property developers posted their first simultaneous monthly and annual sales gains this year in September, but a sharp decline during the subsequent Golden Week holiday shows the market’s recovery remains fragile.
The top 100 real estate firms logged 252.8 billion yuan ($35.5 billion) in contracted sales last month, up 22.1% from August and 0.4% from a year earlier, data from China Real Estate Information Corp. (CRIC) showed.
The momentum quickly faded. During the National Day holiday from Oct. 1 to 8, new home subscriptions in 22 key cities tumbled 33% from a year earlier and 38% from September, according to CRIC data released Oct. 9.
The mixed results highlight the shaky foundations of China’s property market revival. Despite a raft of stimulus measures — including eased purchase restrictions in first-tier cities — improvements appear fleeting. A high comparison base from a policy-driven sales surge in late 2024 also clouds the outlook, suggesting a broad-based recovery remains elusive.
Recent policy easing boosted sales in several major cities during the holiday. Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, which have relaxed purchase curbs since August, saw average daily new home sales rise 52%, 3% and 22% year-on-year, respectively, data from the China Index Academy showed. Guangzhou, which made no changes, recorded a 4% decline.
Still, those gains failed to lift national figures. Across the 22 cities tracked by CRIC, new home subscriptions during the holiday totaled just 1.6 million square meters. Other cities — including Suzhou, Dongguan, Wenzhou and Jinan — recorded year-on-year drops of more than 50%, according to the Linping Residential Big Data Research Institute.
“This year’s holiday property market was cooler than last year’s,” said Wang Jianzi, an analyst at the China Index Academy. Last year’s rebound followed a Sept. 26 policy rollout after a Politburo meeting that called for “stabilizing and reviving the real estate market.”
That stimulus fueled contracted sales by the top 100 developers to 435.5 billion yuan in October 2024, a 73% jump month-on-month and 7.1% rise year-on-year, CRIC data showed. This created a high base for this year’s comparison, while a weak September 2024 base flattered the latest figures.
The September gains were driven by loosened purchase limits in top cities, new project launches by major developers, last year’s low base and seasonal factors, said Tao Shuru, research director at the China Index Academy.
For the first nine months of 2025, cumulative sales by the top 100 developers fell 11.8% year-on-year to 2.3 trillion yuan, though the decline narrowed by 1.3 percentage points from the first eight months.
CRIC expects October’s transaction volume to remain subdued, staying flat or slightly lower than September. The firm said year-on-year sales declines will likely widen due to the high comparison base.
The impact of policy easing in key cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen already appears to be fading, CRIC noted, and signs of a sustained stabilization are still lacking.
caixinglobal.com is the English-language online news portal of Chinese financial and business news media group Caixin. Global Neighbours is authorized to reprint this article.
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