Commentary: How China Can Engineer a Soft Landing for Its Property Market

For more than two decades, China’s real estate industry operated on a simple, perilous premise: high debt, high leverage, and rapid turnover. As long as property values climbed, underlying operational risks were masked. Today, that era is definitively over. As China begins implementing the recently released proposals for its 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), the focus has shifted entirely to de-risking the sector and engineering a fundamentally new development model.