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On March 13, the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China&#34; (hereinafter referred to as the &#34;Plan&#34;) was officially released. For the real estate industry, Chapter 44 &#34;Promoting High-Quality Development of Real Estate&#34; in the Plan sets a clear roadmap for real estate work over the next five years: accelerating the construction of a new model for real estate development, improving a housing system with multiple supply entities, multiple channels of security, and a combination of rental and purchase, to achieve a higher level of housing security.
Zhang Bo, director of the 58 Anjuke Research Institute, commented that the core of real estate in the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan&#34; is to bid farewell to the old path of pursuing scale, relying on affordable housing to meet the basic needs of the people while allowing commercial housing to focus on quality improvement, steadily moving towards a new path of high-quality development.
&#34;From the structure of the text, its core logic can be summarized as 'three levels, two major approaches, one goal'—that is, building a new model, improving the housing system, and enhancing housing standards as the three major pillars, through perfecting the security system and stabilizing market operations as two paths, ultimately achieving the ultimate goal of 'higher-level housing security,'&#34; analyzed Yan Yuejin, deputy director of the Shanghai E-House Real Estate Research Institute.
Building a New Model is the Top Priority in Real Estate Work
Compared to previous five-year plans, the focus of real estate work in the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan&#34; has shifted, with relevant content placed in the strategic task of the 12th chapter &#34;Increasing Support and Improvement of People's Livelihoods to Solidly Promote Common Prosperity for All.&#34; This aligns with the positioning of the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan&#34; recommendations released at the end of October last year.
A relevant person from the China Index Academy pointed out that during the &#34;13th Five-Year Plan&#34; period, real estate-related content was under the &#34;Improvement of New Urbanization Strategy.&#34; This adjustment to &#34;Increasing Support and Improvement of People's Livelihoods&#34; highlights a shift in real estate policy orientation, with a greater emphasis on ensuring and improving people's livelihoods, and various policy measures are expected to be more considered from the perspective of people's livelihoods.
It is worth mentioning that the &#34;Plan&#34; no longer mentions &#34;the positioning that houses are for living in, not for speculation,&#34; but emphasizes &#34;promoting high-quality development of real estate.&#34; It also proposes accelerating the construction of a new model for real estate development, improving a housing system with multiple supply entities, multiple channels of security, and a combination of rental and purchase, to achieve a higher level of housing security.
A relevant person from the China Index Academy believes that during the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan&#34; period, promoting the transition of real estate development from the old model to the new model is the top priority in real estate work, pushing the industry from scale expansion to high-quality development, with the construction of the new model as the main focus. The government work report for 2026 has already clarified &#34;deepening the construction of the basic system and supporting policies for the new model of real estate development,&#34; indicating that the deepening phase has arrived.
&#34;Improving a housing system with multiple supply entities, multiple channels of security, and a combination of rental and purchase&#34; has also been placed in a prominent position. Analysts point out that the housing system remains a key deployment direction, but has shifted from &#34;accelerating establishment&#34; during the &#34;13th Five-Year Plan&#34; to &#34;improving&#34; during the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan,&#34; which may imply that the &#34;housing system with multiple supply entities, multiple channels of security, and a combination of rental and purchase&#34; has already been established, and the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan&#34; period will enter a deep-water zone
In addition, from the perspective of achieving the ultimate goal, the transition from &#34;ensuring that all people have housing and balancing work and residence&#34; during the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan&#34; period to &#34;achieving a higher level of housing security&#34; during the &#34;15th Five-Year Plan&#34; period is expected to further promote the shift from &#34;having a place to live&#34; to &#34;living well.&#34; The improvement of housing quality and living environment will be the focus, with the construction of &#34;good houses&#34; and the provision of &#34;good services&#34; reflecting a higher level of housing security. In the future, more development opportunities are also expected to arise.
Further Improvement of the Housing Security System
The planning outline outlines a clear implementation path for improving the housing security system from four aspects: first, optimizing the supply of affordable housing; second, improving the full-process management; third, exploring the orderly conversion of rental and sale-type housing sources; and fourth, deepening the reform of the housing provident fund.
The outline clarifies that optimizing the supply of affordable housing strengthens housing security for low-income urban families, better meets the basic housing needs of low-income wage earners facing housing difficulties, and gradually addresses the phased housing difficulties of new citizens and youth. It emphasizes strengthening the full-process management of affordable housing, improving management mechanisms for applications, waiting lists, allocation and sale, usage, and exit. It explores the orderly conversion and coordinated use of rental and sale-type affordable housing sources. It deepens the reform of the housing provident fund system, expands its usage scope, and supports flexible employment individuals in participating in the housing provident fund system.
A relevant person in charge of the China Index Academy pointed out that the terminology regarding the supply of affordable housing has shifted from &#34;effectively increasing&#34; in the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan&#34; to &#34;optimizing,&#34; indicating a change in tone. According to data from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, during the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan&#34; period, China constructed and raised over 11 million units of various types of affordable housing and resettlement housing for urban villages and urban dilapidated housing renovations, benefiting over 30 million people. Affordable housing has achieved effective supply, and the &#34;15th Five-Year Plan&#34; period will further optimize supply, with optimization directions possibly including the scale, structure (regional and product structure), and quality of affordable housing, with a greater emphasis on local conditions.
Among them, the expression &#34;exploring the orderly conversion and coordinated use of rental and sale-type affordable housing sources&#34; is relatively rare in previous plans. Yan Yuejin believes that under the traditional model, affordable housing is locked into rental or sale purposes from the outset of project approval, but market demand is dynamically changing—when the demand for rental housing in certain areas is saturated while the demand for sale-type housing is strong, it becomes difficult to flexibly allocate housing sources. The proposed &#34;orderly conversion&#34; means shifting from static housing source management to a dynamic demand response mechanism, which is precisely the specific embodiment and innovative point of &#34;dual-track rental and purchase&#34; in the field of affordable housing.
Zhang Bo pointed out that affordable housing can be understood as a key support for the new cycle, with past emphasis on low- and middle-income groups, while the new stage emphasizes covering diverse urgent needs. Through the conversion of rental and sale housing sources and the coverage of flexible employment individuals by the provident fund, it precisely addresses the housing issues of new citizens and youth. In his view, the expansion of diverse sources can not only absorb idle housing sources but also strengthen the bottom line of people's livelihoods.
Promoting Stable and Healthy Development of the Real Estate Market
In promoting the stable and healthy development of the real estate market, the planning outline starts from three major areas: improving the basic system, supply-demand matching mechanism, and upgrading quality and services
The &#34;Outline&#34; clarifies the need to improve the basic systems for the development, financing, and sales of commercial housing. It promotes the establishment of a corporate system for real estate development projects and a main financing bank system, supporting reasonable financing needs in real estate and effectively and orderly advancing the sale of existing houses. It calls for a reasonable arrangement of the scale and layout of real estate land, promoting coordination between land supply and the stock of housing and population changes. It fully empowers urban governments with autonomy in regulating the real estate market. It encourages the classified disposal of supplied but undeveloped land and ongoing projects, and promotes the revitalization and utilization of existing commercial housing and idle office spaces. Policies tailored to cities will increase the supply of improved housing. It aims to build safe, comfortable, green, and smart &#34;good houses,&#34; implementing quality improvement projects for housing and actions to enhance property service quality. It standardizes the development of the housing rental market and cultivates market-oriented professional rental enterprises. It establishes a safety management system for the entire lifecycle of housing.
Zhang Bo believes that constructing a new model for real estate development will be institutionalized and solidified during the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan&#34; period. It marks a departure from the old logic of high leverage and high turnover, shifting towards a new path focused on people's livelihoods, quality improvement, and strict risk control. By promoting the sale of existing houses and implementing safety management throughout the lifecycle, it focuses on the construction of green and smart &#34;good houses,&#34; making supply more aligned with population and stock changes, thereby alleviating supply-demand mismatches.
Among these, &#34;improving the basic systems for the development, financing, and sales of commercial housing&#34; is placed at the forefront. Yan Yuejin believes that the premise for the stable and healthy development of the market is not short-term price stabilization but the improvement of the basic systems of the industrial chain. The project company system and main financing bank system aim to address long-standing issues of fund misappropriation and risk contagion in the industry; supporting the financing needs of real estate companies also signals a loosening of the subsequent real estate financial environment; the gradual promotion of existing house sales, emphasizing &#34;effective&#34; and &#34;orderly,&#34; will fundamentally change the survival soil of the high-turnover model.
Industry insiders view &#34;reasonably arranging the scale and layout of real estate land, promoting coordination between land supply and the stock of housing and population changes&#34; as a concrete embodiment of the linkage mechanism among the factors of &#34;people, houses, land, and money.&#34; &#34;Fully empowering urban governments with regulatory autonomy&#34; continues the approach of tailoring policies to cities, allowing localities to adjust policies based on actual conditions. &#34;Promoting the classified disposal of supplied but undeveloped land and ongoing projects, and revitalizing existing commercial housing and idle office spaces&#34; points to another key task during the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan&#34; period—revitalizing stock. Against the backdrop of increasing urbanization rates and the shift of urban development towards improving existing stock, the reuse of existing resources will become a new growth point for the industry.
The proposal to &#34;increase the supply of improved housing tailored to cities&#34; further emphasizes the need for policy measures that reflect urban characteristics. Based on the differences in residents' demands for improved housing, the supply is required to match more precisely, and accurately increasing supply based on local demand characteristics may become a significant feature of housing supply during the &#34;14th Five-Year Plan&#34; period. According to data from the China Index Academy, in the first three quarters of 2025, the proportion of 120-144 square meter units in 30 key cities will rise to 30%, with larger unit products becoming mainstream in the new housing market. The proportion of units over 120 square meters is generally increasing, with notable increases in cities like Shanghai, Nanjing, Changsha, and Nanchang for 120-144 square meter units, and significant increases for units over 144 square meters in cities like Xiamen, Hefei, Ningbo, and Wuxi
In addition, Yan Yuejin mentioned that the inclusion of &#34;good housing&#34; in the national planning for the first time marks a leap in industry standards from &#34;qualified&#34; to &#34;high quality.&#34; Although the establishment of a safety management system for the entire lifecycle of housing is the shortest section, it carries significant weight. As the scale of existing housing expands and the age of buildings increases, housing safety management has become an urgent issue. The three systems involved in this planning—housing inspections, housing funds, and housing insurance—aim to build a safety guarantee system covering the entire lifecycle of housing. Among them, the housing safety fund system consists of personal accounts (maintenance funds) and public accounts (fiscal budgets, land transfer fees, etc.), which not only continues the existing institutional arrangements but also innovatively introduces public funding support, providing substantial assistance in addressing the funding challenges for the renovation of old houses.
The China Index Academy believes that, overall, the focus of real estate during the 14th Five-Year Plan period will be on high-quality development as the main goal, with new model construction as an important approach, and with a core focus on livelihood protection, while also balancing market stability and risk prevention. For the industry, the 14th Five-Year Plan period will be a critical time to bid farewell to the old model and move towards high-quality development; for residents, it will usher in a new stage of improved housing quality, enhanced living environments, more diverse housing choices, and more comprehensive rights protection

The "Outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China" has been officially released, clarifying the new model for real estate development in the next five years and emphasizing high-quality development. The plan mentions the need to improve a housing system with multiple supply entities and a dual approach of renting and purchasing to ensure the needs of people's livelihoods. Compared to the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, the policy orientation for real estate has shifted, placing greater emphasis on safeguarding and improving people's livelihoods. The core goal is to achieve a higher level of housing security and promote the transformation of real estate from the old model to the new model

The "14th Five-Year Plan" outline has been officially released. What new changes will there be in real estate development in the next five years?