Transaction recovery, slight price increase, over 60% of transactions below 3 million

Securities Times reporter Zhang Da

The secondhand housing transaction volume in Beijing has clearly increased over the past March. Data from the Centaline Property Research Institute show that in March, Beijing’s secondhand residential online contract signings reached 19,886 units, up 144.6% month over month and up 3.4% year over year, the highest level in nearly 15 months.

Several real estate agency professionals interviewed by Securities Times reporter said that recently, the transaction volume of Beijing’s secondhand homes has picked up, the transaction cycle has noticeably shortened, and prices have inched up slightly.

“Lately, all of Beijing has warmed up—transaction volumes are much higher. Many residential compounds are currently in a state of shortage of available listings.” A staff member at a branch of a large real estate agency in Tongzhou District, Beijing, told Securities Times reporter, “The cheap, good properties we had earlier have all been sold out. Now, when a normally sized unit is newly listed—unless it’s on a particularly low floor or the layout is especially poor—if the price is only slightly higher than the previous transaction price by ten or twenty thousand yuan, it can be sold out fairly quickly.”

A staff member at a branch of another large real estate agency in Dongcheng District, Beijing, told Securities Times reporter that recently, transactions for school-district homes have been relatively frequent.

“In March, our shop signed seventeen or eighteen deals, which is double compared with before.” Another agency’s staff member at a branch in Fengtai District told Securities Times reporter that recently there were more customers, the transaction volume has warmed up, and the total price per home has only risen by about 80,000 to 180,000 yuan.

Regarding the performance of Beijing’s secondhand housing market in March, Leng Hui, an analyst at Beike Research Institute, said in an interview with Securities Times reporter that it was “very good.” In terms of transaction volume, it is the highest level in nearly 15 months; in terms of prices, they have generally remained stable, with a slight increase compared with the earlier period around the start of the year, and the positive trend of stabilizing after a downturn and recovering has continued well.

My Home Research Institute pointed out that on March 31, Beijing’s daily online contract signings for the property market reached 1,422 units, setting a new high for single-day transactions in nearly three years since April 2023, directly demonstrating the recovery of Beijing’s secondhand housing market. More importantly, this round of warming up has not only achieved steady growth in volume, but prices have also moved in a favorable direction in tandem. Data from the National Bureau of Statistics show that in February, Beijing’s secondhand residential price index rose 0.3% month over month, becoming the first to stabilize after falling. From My Home’s transaction data, in March Beijing’s secondhand residential transaction average unit prices continued the stable trend of February, forming a favorable recovery pattern of “volume up and price stable.”

As for the reasons behind the warm-up in Beijing’s property market in March, Leng Hui believes there are mainly two factors. On the one hand, there are seasonal reasons: every year, in the period after the Spring Festival, the market enters a golden period of rapid recovery—what people commonly call the “early spring with a mild upward trend.” On the other hand, there is policy support. The various policy optimization measures introduced in late December last year (for example, easing purchase restrictions, optimizing the conditions for second-home loans, and lowering the VAT rate, etc.) effectively boosted market confidence and also unlocked a portion of homebuyer demand. These newly added demands were gradually converted into actual transactions throughout March.

The concentration of entry by first-time demand groups has become an important underpinning for this “early spring with a mild upward trend” market. My Home data show that in March, secondhand home transaction volume below RMB 3 million accounted for 66.3% of the total secondhand home volume in the same period, up 19.1% year over year, with low-price listings becoming the main driver of transactions.

Regarding whether this “early spring with a mild upward trend” for Beijing’s secondhand housing market can be sustained, Zhang Dawei, chief analyst at Centaline Property, believes that judging from future trends, after the “early spring with a mild upward trend” in March, transactions will likely experience a cyclical pullback in April and May, and the subsequent market direction will still depend on the policy trend.

Looking ahead, My Home Research Institute believes that the real estate market has undergone deep adjustments over the past few years. Under the central government’s deployment to “focus on stabilizing the real estate market,” it has already begun to move into a new stage. As a first-tier city, Beijing has solid fundamentals. The “stabilizing after a downturn and recovering” trend is expected to continue, helping Beijing’s real estate market achieve steady and healthy development.