China’s property slump will be worse than expected

BEIJING — S&P Global Ratings has lowered its forecast for China property sales this year, barely two months into 2026.

The firm said Sunday that primary real estate sales will likely drop by 10% to 14% this year, worse than the 5% to 8% decline for 2026 sales predicted back in October.

“This is a downturn so entrenched that only the government has capacity to absorb the excess inventory,” the analysts said in a note. They added that the state could buy more unsold property to create affordable housing, but that so far these efforts have been piecemeal.

China’s property market, once accounting for more than a quarter of the economy, has seen its annual sales volume halve in just four years. Beijing’s crackdown on developers’ high reliance on debt for growth sparked the initial slump, while consumer demand for homes has yet to pick up.

Economists have long warned of overbuilding in China’s property market. But developers have only kept up construction despite the sales slump, leading to a sixth-straight year of completed, unsold new housing, according to the ratings agency.

“China’s glut of primary housing is keeping a property market recovery out of reach,” the S&P analysts said, noting the oversupply pressures prices to fall by another 2% to 4% this year, following a similar decline last year.

“Falling prices erode homebuyers’ confidence,” S&P’s report said. “It’s a vicious cycle with no easy escape.”

What’s particularly concerning, S&P said, is that the price decline in China’s biggest cities worsened in the fourth quarter of last year. “We previously viewed these markets as healthy, and as the likely starting place of any national property recovery,” the report said.

The cities of Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen reported home price declines last year of at least 3%, the report said, noting Shanghai was the only major city to report an increase, up 5.7% in 2025 from 2024.

In May, S&P predicted a 3% decline in sales of new homes, only to revise that in October to an 8% drop. Sales ended up falling by 12.6% to 8.4 trillion yuan ($1.21 trillion) — less than half the annual sales of 18.2 trillion yuan seen in 2021.

That’s ramping up the pressure on China’s struggling real-estate developers.

If sales end up falling 10 percentage points below S&P’s base case for this year and next, four of the 10 Chinese developers that the company rates could see downward rating pressure, the analysts said.

That excludes China Vanke, once one of the country’s largest developers, which, late last year, asked to delay repayment on some of its debt.

Chinese authorities have yet to release significant new support for real estate, preferring to double down on efforts to develop advanced technologies.

Last month, U.S.-based research firm Rhodium Group said that China’s push into high-tech industries isn’t large enough to offset the country’s property slump, leaving the economy more reliant on exports for growth and more exposed to trade tensions.

Top policymakers are set to release economic goals for the year at a parliamentary meeting next month.