China's housing ministry vows to stabilize real estate industry

The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development held its yearly work conference from Tuesday to Wednesday in Beijing, outlining its major tasks for 2025 and vowing to take even greater efforts to stabilize China's real estate market.

The ministry noted that it will try to foster a new development model for the real estate sector while accelerating a barrage of old-housing renovation projects in Chinese cities.

The meeting said that the ministry will step up efforts to unleash housing market demand while improve market supply in the coming new year.

The ministry noted that existing housing policies and incremental pro-growth stimulus measures will be firmly implemented to ramp up effective market demand for housing, China Construction News reported.

And, more efforts will be made to shore up renovation of the rundown "urban villages" in Chinese cities, by rolling out direct compensation for their renewal. On the basis of renovating additional 1-million "urban village" housing units, the government will continue to expand the scale of downtown residential old-housing renovation in a bid to eliminate hidden safety hazards and improve the residents' living condition, the meeting noted.

To improve market supply, the ministry said that the construction of more commercial homes will be strictly controlled so that current housing stock will be optimized. And, supply of government-subsidized homes will be increased to address the housing needs of new residents, young people and low-income families.

More work should be done to facilitate the formation of a new development model for the important real estate sector, taking into account of many variables on the market, the ministry noted. Also, the ministry will continue to reform the country's property selling system to promote sales of completed homes while improving supervision of property presale funds.

The ministry will accelerate the establishment of a safety management system for the entire housing life-cycle to ratchet up housing safety. And, efforts will be made to strengthen supervision of the whole process of the real estate market in order to protect the legitimate rights and interests of the residents.

Recently, China's real estate market has seen more signs of stabilization with the implementation of a package of the government's supportive policies. 

According to the ministry, new apartments transaction posted year-on-year and month-on-month growth in October and November. And, a total of 3.38 million housing units were delivered this year.

At the Central Economic Work Conference held in early December, Chinese policymakers decided that efforts should be continuously made to reverse the downturn of the real estate sector, reasonably control the supply of urban land for housing development, and promote the establishment of a new model for the industry.