China Advances Full In-Situ House Sales Under 15th Five-Year Plan for Better Buyer Protection

China is steadily rolling out completed residential property sales nationwide under the 15th Five-Year Plan, marking a key shift in the country’s real estate sales system to deliver “what you see is what you get” home purchases and fully safeguard consumers’ legitimate rights and interests.

For decades, China’s real estate sector has relied heavily on pre-sale schemes, a model introduced in the 1990s to ease housing shortages and fuel rapid urbanisation. While the mechanism boosted property development and urban construction financing in the early stages, it has spawned persistent industry pitfalls, including delayed deliveries and inconsistent housing quality between promotional displays and finished properties.

Against a transformed real estate market landscape, the new national plan outlines structured promotion of completed house sales, phasing out the high-leverage, high-turnover development mode that once dominated the industry. The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has confirmed that China has fully completed its nationwide delivery guarantee tasks, laying a solid foundation for establishing long-term home delivery protection mechanisms.

The new sales model addresses core consumer pain points fundamentally. Unlike pre-sold properties that require buyers to wait years for handover based on blueprints and show flats, completed house sales allow purchasers to inspect actual housing quality, lighting, spacing and supporting community facilities on-site before making payments.

A phased, location-specific rollout strategy has been adopted across the country. Multiple cities have launched pilot programmes with diversified operational models. Xuzhou in Jiangsu, Tianjin and Nanchang in Jiangxi have implemented proactive completed sales projects, with some Tianjin projects achieving a transaction rate of over 70 percent within three hours of opening. Certain residential land parcels in Shenzhen mandate full completed house sales in land transfer terms, while some developers convert slow-selling pre-sale projects to completed sales to optimise capital flow.

Regulatory upgrades complement the sales reform. The 15th Five-Year Plan promotes specialised project company operations and dedicated bank financing mechanisms for real estate developments, standardising fund supervision to stabilise market funding supply.

The industry shift is reshaping operational logic for property developers. The extended development cycle of completed sales raises stricter requirements for corporate cash flow, financing capacity and product research precision, replacing the previous speculative “selling expectations” model with a result-oriented “selling verified quality” approach. This transition will drive industrial optimisation, phasing out developers reliant on high-risk leverage while creating room for differentiated development for both large-scale and local specialised property enterprises.

Industry analysis indicates that China’s property market will maintain a dual-track operation in the long run, with pre-sales remaining mainstream and completed sales gradually expanding coverage in key cities and high-quality residential projects to lead the sector’s high-quality transformation.