A three-year panic that once froze China’s property market — the widespread failure to deliver homes buyers had already paid for — has largely been contained. By the end of the 14th Five-Year Plan period, roughly 7.5 million previously sold-but-undelivered homes have been completed and handed over to buyers, with major developers such as Country Garden, Greenland and Sunac accounting for large shares of that tally.
Country Garden reported about 1.85 million completions between 2022 and 2025, while Greenland’s disclosed deliveries imply roughly 76,000 units a year on average in recent years and Sunac’s four-year deliveries exceeded 720,000 units. Several other developers — New Town, CIFI, China South Land and Zhongliang among them — also reported cumulative deliveries in the tens to hundreds of thousands, signalling a broad, system-wide unwind of stalled projects.
Beijing’s campaign to secure delivery has been multi-layered and fast-moving. National, provincial and municipal task forces coordinated “one-project-one-policy” interventions: projects meeting financing criteria were placed on a government-sanctioned “white list” and granted loans, while insolvent developments were steered into bankruptcy reorganisation or liquidation with judicial protections prioritising homebuyers. The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development reported that of 3.96 million targeted ‘guaranteed delivery’ units, 3.918 million — about 99% — have been handed over, and approved loans to white-list projects have topped 7 trillion yuan.
That outcome matters because the delivery crisis threatened far more than developers’ balance sheets. From mid-2021 the sector’s high-leverage, high-turnover model began to fracture, producing stoppages, frozen construction sites and a wave of pre-sold apartments left unfinished. The result was a hit to household confidence, strain on mid-sized banks exposed to property loans, and a fiscal squeeze on local governments accustomed to land-sale revenue.
With the acute delivery problem receding, developers are pivoting from emergency construction to financial repair: debt restructuring, asset disposals, reworking land holdings and reviving recurring cash flows. Several large groups recorded substantive progress on restructurings in 2025, and many firms say they will remain cautious about new land purchases, targeting only high-quality parcels if and when they re-enter the market.
The immediate systemic relief is evident: fewer stalled sites, a decline in prepayment disputes, and nascent signs of price stabilisation in major cities, particularly first-tier markets where demand has proved more resilient. Yet structural risks persist — especially among smaller, highly leveraged developers, local government financing vehicles dependent on land sales, and regional banks with concentrated property exposure.
For international investors and commodity markets, the calming of delivery risk lowers the odds of a disorderly shock from China’s property sector. That said, the resolution so far has relied on state-directed finance and coordinated intervention rather than a clean, market-led deleveraging; the bill for stabilisation has been paid in part by banks and state channels, and bondholders have seen a mix of restructurings and haircuts.
The handover of millions of homes is a milestone that reduces the acute downside risk to China’s economy and buys time for deeper reform. It is not the end of the story: durable recovery will hinge on whether the sector can re-establish sustainable financing models, revive transaction volumes, and shrink the share of distressed developers without chronic state support.