Beijing Requires Towers to Top Out Before New Flats Can Be Sold Off-Plan

Beijing has rewritten the rules of selling a home that does not exist yet. Under an implementation opinion issued jointly by the city's housing, planning, finance-regulation and housing-fund departments and effective September 24, any housing project on land auctioned after August 28 may apply for a presale permit only once the tower's main structure is topped out — the roof slab and rooftop structures fully cast in concrete. The document, announced by state outlets and posted by The Paper, also directs the city to prioritise sales of completed homes, in which a buyer inspects the actual flat rather than a floor plan.

The change executes a national directive. In August, the housing, natural-resources and financial regulators jointly issued a notice "improving the commodity-housing sales system", and China has already begun shifting to selling flats only when they are built. Beijing is the most consequential city to write the topping-out threshold into its own presale approvals: presales were the financing engine of China's building boom, letting developers sell units a year or more before they existed, and they were also what left buyers holding mortgages on towers that stopped rising when developers went under. Requiring a finished shell pushes that risk back onto the developer's balance sheet, and onto the timeline: cash from pre-sales now arrives months later, a squeeze that weighs most on smaller, more leveraged builders.

The policy lands in a market that has already changed shape. At a State Council Information Office briefing last week, the housing ministry said secondhand transactions had risen from 27 percent of the market in 2020 to 46 percent in 2025, and above half — 52 percent — in the first eight months of this year: the moment officials describe as the "stock era", in which resale homes now change hands more often than new ones. A sales model built for a country that could not build fast enough is being retired for one that must sell what it has already built.

The Beijing document runs through six policy areas, from tightened presale management to pilots of completed-home sales, and state coverage framed it as the city "advancing existing-home sales in an orderly way". It drew wide pickup beyond Weibo's own trends — Huanqiu and The Paper both fronted it, and it entered Baidu's hot-search board within hours — a sign of how closely the old presale system is watched by ordinary households, whose down payments were the collateral of the boom years.

What happens next is the open question in every report of the notice: whether other megacities adopt Beijing's topping-out threshold, and how quickly presale — the institution that built China's skyline — shrinks into a niche product. For buyers, the practical meaning is already plain. In Beijing, the flat you put money down on will, from now on, have a roof.