Four Chinese Cities Move Together to Rein In Pre-Sale Home Sales

Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Wuhan have all issued new rules on how homes are sold — and they point the same direction: away from selling flats that do not exist yet. According to a summary that climbed Baidu's search board, the four cities set August 28, 2026 as the dividing line: projects on land transacted after that date will prioritize completed-home sales, and where pre-sale is still allowed, it requires the main structure to be topped out first. The rules also cap purchase deposits — between 1 and 5 percent depending on the city — and put that money under supervision through the entire transaction.

The target is China's pre-sale system, imported in the 1990s and central to the fastest urban housing build in history. Developers learned to fund construction with buyers' own mortgages, collecting full payment a year or more before delivering anything; when the sector's leverage turned after 2021, that arrangement inverted into the country's most corrosive consumer anxiety — towers that stopped mid-build, and buyers still paying on mortgages for flats they could not occupy. Delivery risk, more than price, is what keeps many Chinese buyers away from new-build homes.

The new rules attack that risk at its source. Requiring a topped-out structure before pre-sale means a buyer's money arrives when the frame physically exists, not when the pit has been dug; deposit caps and whole-process supervision close the gaps through which down payments historically wandered. Shanghai had already moved in this direction — tightening its pre-sale rules even as buyers bid up its aging second-hand stock — but the synchronized, four-city version reads as a coordinated model rather than a municipal experiment.

The timing fits the market's larger turn. Second-hand homes now outsell new ones nationwide in what officials have called the housing “stock era”, and the center has been pulling demand-side levers, launching its first-ever central mortgage-interest subsidy for first-time buyers. What the four cities are adding is the supply-side counterpart: confidence built on delivery rather than on cheaper credit.

The costs will fall on developers. Pre-sale was the industry's cheapest financing, and forcing builders to carry construction further before any cash arrives favors the solvent and the state-backed, and will likely slow the start of new projects in an already weak cycle. That trade — slower construction today for flats that actually get delivered tomorrow — is precisely what the four cities have chosen. In effect, they have decided that the surest way to bring buyers back to new housing is to let them see what they are paying for before they pay.