Beneath the headline-level declines in prices and sales volumes, there has been a bigger shift happening in the new home markets in China: a shift away from the pre-sale model that has dominated the market structure for a long time (and still does, just to a much lesser degree).

New signals in that direction came out in the past weeks.

On October 28, the “CPC Central Committee’s Recommendations on Formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development” document was released. In conjunction with this, Ni Hong, the Minister of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, published a signed article titled “Promoting the High-Quality Development of the Real Estate Sector" that includes a call for:

“(...) advancing the transition toward a completed-home sales system, ensuring buyers get what they see ["所见即所得"] and fundamentally reducing delivery risks.”

For projects that continue to adopt the presale model, he emphasized “(...) the importance of standardising presale fund supervision to effectively safeguard homebuyers’ legal rights and interests.”

The "what you see is what you get" (or WYSIWYG, to borrow from the software world) is therefore becoming the theme in the new home market in China, and the trend has been playing out for a while already, driven by homebuyers' concerns about the delivery of the pre-sold units in the current market downturn, as the chart below illustrates.

Note that the big decline in new home sales concerns the pre-sale segment (the orange line in the chart above), which stands in contrast to the recent INCREASE, albeit from much smaller absolute levels, of the completed new homes (the grey line).

Pre-sales as a percentage of total new home sales reached 90% in 2020-2021, but have come down now to 68% for the Jan-Oct 2025 period (here in terms of sqm GFA):