Ding Zuyu

Ding Zuyu is an analyst of China’s real estate industry who has long been engaged in real estate market research and commentary and has held annual property market analysis conferences for many consecutive years. According to a report by China Real Estate Network, on January 7, 2026, the annual “Ding Zuyu on the Property Market” conference, held for ten consecutive years, took place as scheduled, at which Ding Zuyu gave his judgements on the scale of the real estate market, developers’ strategies and industry trends.

On market scale, Ding Zuyu believes that the era of growth in property developers’ scale has ended and the industry’s scale has returned to the level before 2010, but the pressure has basically been released. Citing sales data revised by the National Bureau of Statistics, he noted that commodity housing sales area peaked in 2021 at 1.61 billion square metres, while the forecast for 2025 was 900 million square metres, a scale back to that of 2009; commodity housing transaction value was 8.4 trillion yuan, back to the level of 2015. Of this, commodity residential transaction area was 740 million square metres and transaction value 7.4 trillion yuan, roughly half of the peak. He also mentioned that in 2025 the number of developers with sales of 100 billion yuan had shrunk to 10 and there were only 65 developers with sales of 10 billion yuan, compared with 173 such 10-billion-yuan companies at the peak in 2020. He believes the return of scale to rationality means the industry is completing a process of deflating the bubble and deleveraging, and pointed out that real estate development investment plus real estate value added accounts for 12% of GDP, and that from 2026 to 2030 total national purchases of new and second-hand commodity housing are expected to remain at a scale of 800 to 900 million square metres.

Ding Zuyu believes that, as the industry’s bottoming out is gradually confirmed, developers’ strategies will undergo major changes. He listed three changes: the contraction of city footprints is forcing large developers to flatten their management models, with Poly, China Overseas and China Merchants acquiring land in 66, 25 and 41 cities respectively in 2021, but only in 19, 15 and 17 cities respectively in 2025; “good housing” is forcing companies to comprehensively upgrade their operating systems, with investment, design, research, development, marketing and property management linked in series and in parallel, making the project team model more important; and the sale of completed homes is forcing a shift in the development model, from “fast” sales and “slow” development to “fast” development and “strong” sales, with the development cycle controllable at around two years and large developers delivering bare-shell units able to achieve 18 months. He also suggested that non-core cities harbour scattered investment opportunities and that there will be more and more local leaders in future, but he does not recommend that most large developers enter these markets.

On industry trends for 2026, Ding Zuyu said that it is certain the industry will stop falling and stabilise, and that a new turning point will definitely appear in the real estate industry in 2026, but confirming the bottom still requires four certainties: policy, house prices, products and supply. He believes that on policy the market should be told there will be no “big move”; rather than thinking about a “big move” of interest subsidies, it would be better to lower housing provident fund rates, and lifting purchase restrictions in Beijing and Shanghai would have little impact on the national real estate market; house prices have already bottomed out and second-hand homes have been oversold; on products, buyers should not be made to feel that later products will keep getting better, policies have been relaxed as far as they should be, and what can be competed on in future is property services; certainty of supply is harder, as local governments may still increase supply in hot areas, and he hopes the good state of supply and demand will be maintained. He said that if the four certainties are achieved, 2026 will definitely be the bottom, but for Chinese real estate this is only half-time; after a period of rapid development and a four-to-five-year adjustment period, the industry will have another cycle of twenty or thirty years; thinking in operational terms, China’s real estate market still has a development period of thirty years, fifty years or even longer ahead, and now is only the beginning of long-termism.