A two-day national housing and urban-rural development work conference that ended on Wednesday pledged to continue efforts to stabilize the real estate market and reverse its downturn in 2025, while recognizing the positive momentum the property market has gained at the end of this year.

The positive changes are attributed to the effects of a number of pro-housing policies the authorities have adopted, including reductions in mortgage rates, lower down payment requirements, relaxed purchase restrictions, and improvements to land use, fiscal and tax policies. Of course, in the short term, the housing market is yet to resolve some tricky and challenging tasks to realize stable development. To avoid the spread of risks in the real estate market, the authorities must make greater efforts to promote the delivery of housing projects and create a good environment for establishing a new development model for the sector.

In addition to directly bailing out the housing market, the authorities need to promote a new development model to realize its stable development, which is also a long-term mechanism for the sector's development. As part of efforts to establish a new development model for the real estate sector, the country should support urban village and dilapidated housing renovation projects.

The country also needs to advance the construction of government-subsidized and other forms of affordable homes for new urban residents, young people and migrant workers to meet their housing needs. At the same time, greater efforts should also be made to increase the supply of improved housing, particularly high-quality homes.

In order to stop the real estate market from falling further and help it stabilize, the two-day meeting stressed that the country's stock and incremental real estate policies should be firmly and well implemented, including strictly controlling incremental real estate projects as soon as possible, deciding whether to reduce or suspend land supply based on inventory conditions, revitalizing the stock of land and housing, making good use of special bonds, special loans and re-loans and other tools, and accelerating the purchase of inefficient idle land and housing by the government.

In short, China's real estate market is showing signs of stabilizing in 2024, and 2025 will be a crucial year for it to come back onto the track of stable development. At the policy level, the country should not only try to stabilize the housing market to solve its short-term problems, but also actively explore new models to boost consumer confidence in the market's prospects.

21ST CENTURY BUSINESS HERALD