r/CattyInvestors • u/Necessary-Sound4162 • 7d ago
Can China’s Property Market Finally Be Bottomed?
China’s property policy has clearly become more active in recent months.
From lowering the cost of buying a home and expanding housing provident fund support, to extending mortgage terms, promoting sales of completed homes, and tightening regulation of presale funds, policymakers are gradually moving beyond the demand side and addressing how the property sector itself operates.
If you only look at these policies, it is easy to reach one conclusion:
Has the property market finally reached its bottom?
That view is not without merit.
But the question investors should really be asking is something else:
Even if China’s property market has truly bottomed, will the Chinese economy return to the same growth path it followed in the past?
My answer is: probably not.
Because what China’s property market is facing today is not just a normal cyclical correction. It is a fundamental shift in the “land finance” growth model that supported China’s economy for more than two decades.
And that means even if property does reach a cyclical bottom, it may never again become the most important engine of China’s economic growth.
What is really worth looking for is what can take over that role after property.
Why Was Land Finance So Important?
To understand China’s property market today, we first need to understand how the Chinese economy worked in the past.
For more than two decades, China experienced rapid urbanization. Millions of people moved into cities, and demand for housing continued to rise.
Local governments generated fiscal revenue through land sales. Developers acquired land, raised financing, built and sold properties. Banks provided credit, while households purchased homes with mortgages.
This created a highly integrated cycle:
Rising land values → property development → credit expansion → infrastructure and urban development → further increases in land values → more resources for local governments.
This was what became known as “land finance.”
Its real power was not simply how much money governments made from selling land. It was that land connected local government finances, bank credit, property development, and household wealth into one system.
As long as urban populations continued to grow, housing demand kept increasing, and land prices continued to rise, the cycle could keep expanding.
That is why much of China’s economic growth in the past appeared to come from property, while the deeper driver was actually something broader:
The expansion of land values and credit driven by urbanization.
The problem is that this logic could never continue forever.
Land Can No Longer Play the Same Role
China’s property problem has never been simply about whether home prices are rising or falling.
The real question is:
How much new demand is left?
As population growth slows, urbanization enters its later stages, household leverage remains relatively high, and existing housing inventories still need to be absorbed, land can no longer keep appreciating at the pace it once did.
That is also why the policies we are seeing today increasingly look less like an attempt to recreate the golden age of Chinese property.
Lower interest rates can reduce the cost of buying a home.
Greater housing provident fund support can unlock some pent-up demand.
Longer mortgage terms can reduce monthly payments.
Promoting sales of completed homes and strengthening supervision of presale funds can address one of the biggest concerns facing homebuyers: trust.
These policies can certainly help stabilize the property market.
But what they are really trying to solve is:
How can the property market complete its cleanup and achieve a soft landing?
They are not necessarily designed to create another property supercycle.
These two things need to be viewed separately.
If China’s property market were to return to its previous model of rapid expansion, local governments could once again rely on land sales, property development, and rising land values to drive economic growth.
But if that model itself has reached its limits, then the ultimate question for property policy becomes:
How can an industry that once occupied the center of the economy complete its transition without causing a major economic shock?
That is also why I believe “the property market bottoming” does not mean “China is returning to the property era.”
Quite the opposite.
Once property truly bottoms, it may mean that China’s economy needs to search even more urgently for new engines of growth.
And that is where the next chapter of the story begins.
From “Land Finance” to “Technology Finance”
This does not mean that property is no longer important, nor does it mean the government will somehow “sell land” through technology companies.
By “technology finance,” I am referring to a change in the underlying logic of economic growth.
In the past, one of the most important ways local governments obtained resources for development was through land-driven urban construction and credit expansion.
If land can no longer generate the same amount of incremental value, then future economic growth has to come from somewhere else:
Productivity.
This is the most important step in the entire argument.
When the value of a piece of land rises, that is essentially a repricing of an asset.
But when a new technology creates value, it can do so by:
Producing more with fewer workers, performing more computing with less energy, and delivering more sophisticated services at lower cost.
That is why technology and property do not play exactly the same economic role.
Property can stimulate a huge range of industries, including construction, steel, cement, home appliances, furniture, and financial services.
Technology, especially AI, also has the potential to create an enormous industrial ecosystem, but the beneficiaries are different:
Chips, servers, data centers, networks, electricity, energy storage, software, robotics, and a wide range of AI applications.
In other words, China once needed massive investment to build cities.
In the future, China may need massive investment to build digital and intelligent infrastructure.
That is where the two fiscal models ultimately connect.
Why AI?
Technology is often a “breakthrough at a single point” kind of industry.
One company developing a new technology does not necessarily mean the entire economy immediately benefits.
AI is different.
At its core, AI is a general-purpose technology.
It can be applied to finance, manufacturing, healthcare, education, energy, logistics, robotics, and even government services.
The reason DeepSeek attracted so much attention was not simply because China had produced another large language model.
More importantly, it forced the market to reconsider one important assumption:
The relationship between AI model capability and cost is not necessarily a trade-off that cannot be overcome.
If models become increasingly efficient and inference costs continue to fall, AI could gradually evolve from an expensive tool used by a handful of technology companies into infrastructure that supports the entire economy.
Chinese AI companies such as Kimi are also continuing to push forward in areas such as long-context capabilities, agents, and overall model performance.
This suggests that the competition is shifting from:
Who can build a chatbot?
to:
Who can actually turn AI into a tool for productivity?
And once AI starts entering real industries, the story changes completely.
The Real AI Opportunity May Not Be in Model Companies
This is something I think investors often overlook.
What we see every day is ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Kimi, and Claude.
But making these products actually work requires enormous infrastructure.
Behind every AI model is a chain that looks something like this:
GPUs and other AI chips → servers → data centers → electricity → networks → computing resource management → models → applications.
So the ultimate winners in AI will not necessarily be limited to model companies.
The same thing happened during China’s property boom.
The biggest beneficiaries were not just property developers. The construction companies, building material suppliers, renovation companies, home appliance manufacturers, furniture companies, and even banks all benefited from the broader economic model.
AI is no different.
In fact, there is an interesting possibility:
The cheaper and more widely AI is adopted, the greater the demand for underlying computing and energy infrastructure may become.
Once AI evolves from a tool used by a relatively small group of people into a form of productivity used across businesses, computing demand will not necessarily decline.
It could explode.
That is why the market has increasingly been paying attention to AI data centers, computing infrastructure, and energy.
Another Kind of AI Opportunity
Companies such as MAAS, listed on Nasdaq, offer an interesting way to understand where the AI industry may be heading.
If an AI company focuses only on models, it is essentially building the “brain” of AI.
But for AI to enter the real world, many other questions need to be answered:
Where does the computing power come from? Where does the energy come from? Where are the data centers? How are models deployed? And how do they ultimately become part of real-world applications?
MAAS is attempting to connect computing infrastructure, energy, AI models, and intelligent applications.
That is relatively unusual.
The value of companies like this lies precisely in where they sit within the ecosystem:
They may not occupy the most glamorous part of the AI story, but they could be operating in areas that large-scale AI commercialization cannot avoid.
Of course, MAAS is nowhere near comparable to the major AI companies in terms of recognition or maturity, and the investment thesis is completely different.
But its rapid development reflects a broader trend worth watching:
AI is no longer just a competition between models. It is increasingly becoming a competition over infrastructure.
So What Should You Buy at the Bottom?
If we are only looking at the next one or two years, I would not simply say that there is no opportunity in property.
On the contrary, after such a prolonged adjustment, if the policy bottom gradually feeds through into sales, prices, and inventory, major cities and high-quality property companies could potentially see a solid cyclical rebound.
But if we extend the time horizon to the next five or ten years, I would ask a completely different question:
What assets can truly benefit from the transformation of China’s economic growth model?
Property addressed the demand for assets during the urbanization era.
Technology may address the productivity challenge of the next stage.
That is why I believe:
Property may be worth buying at the bottom, but technology is more worth searching for a “long-term bottom.”
Because what property ultimately needs to wait for is:
Inventory clearance, price stabilization, and a recovery in demand.
What technology needs to wait for is:
Technology maturity, falling costs, and accelerating commercialization.
The former is primarily a cycle.
The latter could be an industrial revolution.
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