The Chongqing Municipal Housing and Urban-Rural Development Commission announced on its official website that, starting from February 8, 2025, the re-trading restrictions on housing previously included in the two-year selling restriction policy in the central urban area will be lifted. This marks the official end of the selling restriction policy implemented in Chongqing since September 2017.
According to a reporter from Daily Economic News, Chongqing’s real estate market continued to heat up in 2017. To implement the principle of “houses are for living, not for speculation,” new and second-hand residential properties purchased in the central urban area were required to obtain the real estate ownership certificate for two years before they could be traded on the market.
However, as the supply-demand relationship in the real estate market underwent significant changes, the selling restriction conditions in Chongqing were adjusted in September 2023 to require that “houses could be traded on the market only after obtaining the house purchase contract registration certificate for two years and the real estate ownership certificate.” The policy was further relaxed in May 2024, allowing newly built commodity houses sold as ready-to-move-in properties to be traded on the market immediately after completing the online contract registration and obtaining the real estate ownership certificate. In September 2024, any new and second-hand residential properties purchased in the central urban area (based on the online contract registration date) could be traded on the market upon obtaining the real estate ownership certificate.
The complete lifting of the selling restriction this time indicates that any residential property purchased by homebuyers, as long as it has a real estate ownership certificate, can be traded on the market.
“Considering that a large number of housing sources transacted during the implementation of the selling restriction policy have been gradually released, it is expected that the number of listings in the second-hand housing market will steadily increase after the policy is introduced, and the market activity will continue to rise,” said Wang Yong, General Manager of the Southwest Region of the China Index Academy.
It is worth noting that compared to the continuously shrinking new housing market in recent years, the second-hand housing market in Chongqing’s central urban area has seen higher trading activity. Data from the China Index Academy shows that since 2019, the transaction area of second-hand commodity residential properties in Chongqing’s central urban area has stabilized at over 10 million square meters. In 2024, 108,000 units were transacted, with a transaction area of 11.087 million square meters, representing a year-on-year increase of 2.7%.
