Welcome back to “China color,” a column that records Chinese people’s unfiltered voices behind macro-level analysis and numbers, as well as field trips by our contributors. You can read all the previous issues here.
The burst of the housing bubble is a common culprit behind underwhelming consumer sentiment, but what does that mean in practice?
Chinese households typically have 60-70% of investments in real estate, which is disproportionate compared with many other countries. As housing prices go down, many feel that their sacrifices and compromises made for work and mortgage during the high-growth era have been in vain.
On October 20, China released data on changes in new home prices across 70 large and medium-sized cities from January to September 2025. Apart from Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Taiyuan, where new home prices remained resilient, all other cities saw price declines of between 2% and 7% compared with the same period last year. And that’s just for new homes — prices for pre-owned homes have fallen by roughly 5% to 10% during that period.
Behind these numbers, what are people really thinking? We compiled some representative posts from RedNote and professional networking site Maimai to let people speak for themselves.
Across major cities like Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hefei, homeowners are realizing that property prices of their investment have fallen back to where they were seven or eight years ago.
People who bought at the market’s peak are now facing losses of millions. Once-hyped districts where apartments sold out overnight are now full of listings few want.
People are expressing a wave of collective depression online over the plummeting housing prices, a sentiment many describe as the “sorrow of middle age.”
Some have already sold their homes at low prices, taking losses of more than one million yuan in order to prevent further damage. Still, a portion of homeowners choose to wait, holding on to the hope that prices might rebound：
Many are now asking why housing prices didn’t fall during the years of the pandemic from 2020 to 2022, but instead, plummeted afterward.
As one comment puts it, “The rice cooker doesn’t cool down as soon as it’s turned off”.
As many have come to realize, the plummeting housing price is more than a market correction, but a reflection of deeper shifts — slowing population growth, changing attitudes among younger generations, and a fading belief that real estate is a guaranteed path to wealth.
The younger generation now holds a very different attitude toward homeownership.
Some already have apartments purchased by their parents and are keeping them despite the depreciation in value. Others, however, are finding that buying a home is suddenly within reach for the first time, as prices fall to levels their parents could only dream of. Some claim they are now more motivated to work harder to afford these “cheap” homes.
Yet for many others, the idea of owning a home is no longer as appealing as it once was. Just like marriage or having children, which all have lost much of its allure.
Renting no longer feels shameful or unstable, especially when surviving a 996 work schedule already takes so much out of them.
Together with a range of government subsidies — from childbirth incentives to appliance-purchasing stipends — this generation is sometimes described as “lucky.”
But are they really? The fierce competition in the job market, the stagnating wages, and the devaluation of university diplomas make their path no easier than their parents’. If anything, they are facing a new form of insecurity:
One that no longer revolves around owning a home, but around finding stability in an economy that seems to be cooling far slower than it appears.
Witnessing the shockwaves of the housing market, people are increasingly leaning toward living in the moment. They’ve learned, often the hard way, that you never really know what comes next, whether it’s a crash in real estate, the stock market, cryptocurrency, or even falling victim to scams.
A pervasive sense of insecurity now lingers. Many have been struck by one collapse after another, leaving them disillusioned with the idea of long-term stability. In such uncertain times, the pursuit of happiness, simple, immediate, and personal, has quietly become the new motto for many. 🔚
With editorial help from ChatGPT
The last bit about being an 'ordinary person' is so real. I feel like in every society, the ordinary people feel they're gonna get screwed one way or another, whether that's the job market, housing market, financial markets etc. You see similar sentiments in the UK, with lots of people feeling like no matter how hard they work the things around them are getting worse and they have little influence over their circumstances. All you can do is persevere and 'not check the answers after an exam' as one person put it!
The housing market in China was insane! Purely driven by investor greed, sentiment and FOMO. Watched this build up over 2019-2020 and just couldn't understand people ignoring the basics - excess supply, and declining population means no demand. No demand leads to declining prices. Happy for speculators to go on the ride up, but get out before the rollercoaster ride down! I saw the same happen with the crazy drive to buy gold and not everyone made it out at the top.