China’s letting the market determine the clearing price for new homes.
That’s a new idea for them. Sort of.
As China urbanized, mass migration from the countryside to the nation’s cities pushed up home prices, imperiling affordability. The Party’s solution — or one of them anyway — entailed capping prices on so-called “pre-sale permits.” Long story short, if you were a developer and you wanted to sell units in a new project before they (the units) were finished, you were obliged to keep pric