From "Breaking Ground" to "Deep Cultivation": Real Estate Development New Model Enters New Stage of Institutional Implementation

2026 is the first year of the “14th Five-Year Plan.” This year’s government work report once again clearly emphasizes the goal of “focusing on stabilizing the real estate market,” signaling an important shift from “solving the problem” to “deepening development” in new real estate development models.

It is noteworthy that work related to real estate is still placed under the section of “effectively preventing and resolving key risks in the field.” This arrangement reflects the current objective reality that market stabilization is still in progress, and also contains deeper policy logic. Building new development models for real estate is fundamentally the key to resolving risks and achieving market stability and healthy industry growth. In other words, stabilizing the market and promoting transformation are not two separate tasks but two dimensions of the same goal. A stable market environment creates necessary conditions for building new models, while the gradual implementation of the institutional framework for these models will provide fundamental institutional guarantees for long-term market stability.

The government work report states, “Deepen the construction of basic systems and supporting policies for new real estate development models.” This shows an evolution from the previous statement of “accelerating the construction of new real estate development models.” If “accelerating construction” focused on establishing direction and top-level design, then “deepening the construction of basic systems and supporting policies” indicates that the new models have entered a new stage of institutionalization and systematic implementation.

A series of institutional reforms are being steadily promoted in core areas such as real estate development, financing, and sales. The development phase emphasizes solidifying project company systems to isolate risks and clarify responsibilities; in financing, the implementation of a lead bank system helps establish more stable and standardized bank-enterprise relationships; in sales, promoting the system of pre-sale of existing properties fundamentally prevents delivery risks. The government work report proposes “further leveraging the ‘guaranteed delivery’ whitelist system to prevent debt default risks,” which is aimed at consolidating risk prevention results and promoting the normalization of institutional operation.

Regarding supply and demand matching mechanisms, efforts are being made to establish a “people-property-money” linkage mechanism, where people determine housing, housing determines land, and housing determines finance, to promote supply-demand balance from the source. The policy of “controlling increments city-by-city, reducing inventory, and optimizing supply,” as proposed in the report, essentially reflects this mechanism under current market conditions.

In terms of housing supply systems, the dual-track system of increasing market supply and providing guarantees continues to improve. For the first time, the report mentions “strengthening housing security for newly married and newly parented families, supporting multi-child families in improving housing needs,” closely linking housing policies with population policies and making an important step toward precisely meeting different groups’ housing demands. Additionally, the report proposes exploring multi-channel activation of stock commercial housing for保障性住房 (affordable housing), reflecting a significant shift in the mode of保障性住房 supply.

Regarding the improvement of living quality, the report states, “Orderly promote the construction of safe, comfortable, green, and intelligent ‘good houses,’ and implement quality improvement projects for housing and property services.” The policy focus has shifted from “building good houses” to “managing good houses,” with a system of quality management covering the entire housing lifecycle gradually taking shape.

The construction of new real estate development models is a gradual process that requires coordinated handling of the relationships between the present and the future, market and保障, incremental and stock, promoting development and preventing risks. During the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, China’s new urbanization continues to advance, with ample room for optimizing and adjusting urban stock; the public’s expectations for “good houses” are rising, and the real estate sector still has significant development potential. The government work report also includes high-quality urban renewal as a key task of new urbanization, proposing new directions such as building innovative industrial communities and business communities, providing important entry points for the real estate industry to find new roles in high-quality urban development.

Overall, this year’s government work report presents a more complete policy system for the real estate sector, clearer goals, and more specific institutional arrangements. The evolution from “accelerating the construction” to “deepening the development of basic systems and supporting policies” marks the transition of the new real estate development model from establishing direction to institutional implementation, from “solving the problem” to “deepening development.” We look forward to high-quality development in the real estate sector making solid progress in the benign interaction of market stabilization and transformation in the opening year of the “14th Five-Year Plan.”