After the 828 New Policy, "small land parcels" are highly sought after.

On November 12, 2026, the plot of Dongsha International Commercial Port in Liwan District, Guangzhou completed the transfer, and was won by Poly Development at the reserve price of 1.305 billion yuan as scheduled, with a transaction floor price of about 25,000 yuan per square meter; the riverside commercial and residential comprehensive plot (No. 0930) originally planned to be transferred on the same day has been previously announced to be postponed to the auction on December 8.

As the first batch of key residential plots launched in the core urban area after the implementation of the 828 Detailed Rules in Guangzhou, the result of "one postponed and one auction, pure residential plot covered at reserve price" echoes the recent land auction performance in core cities such as Hangzhou: "After the 828 New Policy", the price increase behavior of real estate enterprises is rapidly concentrating on small-volume plots.

01

On November 12, the No. 0929 pure residential plot of Dongsha International Commercial Port in Liwan, Guangzhou was successfully auctioned on schedule.

The profitability and de-stocking certainty of the No. 0929 pure residential plot are relatively clear. The plot has a floor area ratio of 3.2 and a maximum building height of 80 meters, which is suitable for planning 4-5 residential buildings, focusing on creating 3-4 bedroom products with moderate area, accurately matching the gap in mid-end demand in the area. Calculated at the transaction floor price of 25,285 yuan per square meter, referring to the mainstream new house selling price of 50,000-60,000 yuan per square meter in the plate, after deducting conventional costs such as construction and installation, taxes and marketing, the profit margin is relatively thin but still controllable for deep-cultivating real estate enterprises. At the same time, the plot has a moderate volume and controllable total value. Under the existing house sales rules, the capital occupation cycle and sales pressure are relatively controllable. The No. 0930 plot originally scheduled to be transferred on the same day has been postponed to the auction on December 8.

The two plots are both located in the Dongsha area at the southeast corner of the Bai'etan Business District, which is the core node of the riverside renewal and industry-residence integration in western Guangzhou. However, due to different locations, business formats and development requirements, the maturity of supporting facilities and profit logic show obvious stratification, which directly leads to the differentiation of the transfer rhythm.

The profit calculation of the postponed No. 0930 commercial and residential plot is more complicated. The total starting price of this plot is 3.736 billion yuan, with a planned floor area of 157,300 square meters, including commercial and business formats. Although the residential part can rely on the river view to create high-end products, there is uncertainty in the de-stocking and operation of the commercial and office formats, coupled with the pressure of capital occupation, real estate enterprises need a longer cycle to complete the scheme demonstration.

02

The differentiated performance of "smooth transaction of small pure residential plots and postponed transfer of large-scale comprehensive plots" in Guangzhou this time is another typical sample of the current changes in land transaction structure.

We made a statistical comparison of the plots before and after the 828 New Policy, and found that not only the average volume of the overall transaction residential plots has decreased, but the shrinking trend of the premium plots in terms of scale is more obvious, and the scale differentiation pattern of "small plots are more sought-after, and large plots are treated with prudence" is becoming increasingly clear.

From the overall transaction statistics, the average volume of residential plots listed and transacted before the "828" is about 63,100 square meters; for the residential plots listed and transacted after the "828", the overall average volume per plot has dropped to 61,400 square meters, showing a gentle miniaturization trend.

This trend is even more significant for premium plots: the average volume of premium transaction plots before the "828" is 60,600 square meters, the average volume of premium transaction plots after the "828" has dropped to 50,600 square meters, and the median volume per plot is only 43,700 square meters, a decrease significantly higher than the overall market level. After the new policy, the price increase land acquisition behavior of real estate enterprises is increasingly concentrated in smaller-scale projects; even if large-scale plots have acceptable locations, most of them end up with transactions at reserve prices.

The change of the cumulative scale distribution curve further verifies the miniaturization trend of premium plots. Among the premium transaction plots, plots with a planned floor area of less than 60,000 square meters account for about 60% of the plots listed before the "828"; for the premium plots listed after the "828", this proportion has risen to 74%. In other words, more than 70% of the premium plots in the market after "828" come from small and medium-sized projects below 60,000 square meters; the frequency of premium in large-scale plots has decreased significantly.

From the perspective of the premium ratio of plots in different building area ranges, the characteristics of this scale differentiation are more intuitive. Before the "828", the premium ratio of plots of all volumes was relatively balanced: the premium occurrence rate of plots below 60,000 square meters was about 30%, that of plots of 60,000-100,000 square meters was about 28%, and that of plots above 100,000 square meters was about 32%. Large-scale high-quality plots also had strong bidding appeal. After the "828", the premium transaction proportion of plots below 60,000 square meters is 16%, while that of plots above 60,000 square meters drops to 7-8%. The differentiation mainly falls on the 60,000 square meter line, indicating that a threshold effect has been formed, and only plots with a sufficiently small volume have the possibility of being increased in price.

03

For plots that can still generate premiums after the 828 New Policy, "small" is not their only feature.

We have disassembled 283 residential-related land plots transacted in 32 first- and second-tier cities since September, of which 45 were transacted at a premium, accounting for 15.9%. Among these 45 plots, 30 have a floor area ratio of less than 2.0, close to 70%; those with a total price of less than 1 billion yuan account for nearly 70%.

For example, the plot XS010304-07 in the core unit of Xiaoshan Century City, Hangzhou, has a planned floor area of 55,500 square meters, a starting floor price of 36,000 yuan per square meter. After 97 rounds of bidding, the transaction floor price is 53,472 yuan per square meter, with a premium rate of 48.53%, which was won by Hangzhou Jianlin Real Estate Development Co., Ltd. under Binjiang Group. This is the first residential plot transferred in the urban area after the implementation of the 828 Detailed Rules in Hangzhou.

The plot in Yixin Sub-district, Shuangliu District, Chengdu, has a planned floor area of 51,600 square meters, a starting floor price of 12,000 yuan per square meter, and a transaction price of 16,750 yuan per square meter, with a premium of 39.58%. The plot in Changqiao, Wuzhong, Suzhou, has a planned floor area of about 40,600 square meters, a total transaction price of 671 million yuan, a floor price of 16,508 yuan per square meter, and a premium of 17.91%, which was won by Jinmao after 51 rounds of bidding. The Xiangmihu plot in Futian, Shenzhen, was transferred on September 10. 7 real estate enterprises bid for 257 rounds, and China Overseas won it with 2.55 billion yuan, with a premium rate of 125.5%. It is the first residential plot in the country with a premium exceeding 100% after 828, and its volume also falls in the small and medium range.

There are also counterexamples. A 121,000 square meter plot in Xiaodian District, Taiyuan, was transacted at a premium of 75.80% on September 30. Jiangxi Bangyu Real Estate Development entered the main urban area of Taiyuan for the first time under the competition of Poly; a 103,300 square meter plot in Chengzhong District, Xining, had a premium of 49.57%. This shows that large-scale plots are not absolutely without bidding, but both of these two plots appear in central and western cities with low absolute land prices and low total price thresholds, which are individual cases and are not enough to change the overall structure.

The three types of characteristics that real estate enterprises are willing to pay a premium for are low density, small volume, and low total price, all of which point to the same thing: to keep the capital occupation of a single project within an affordable range.

As of the beginning of November, 28 provinces and municipalities across the country have promoted the 828 New Policy, and most cities stipulate that plots that have been announced but not transferred before August 28 can still apply for pre-sale according to the original pre-sale conditions before the end of 2027.

Once the rules are changed, the payment collection node will be postponed accordingly. According to the calculation of the Puru Digital Intelligence Research Center based on typical projects in sample cities, the additional financial cost of the existing house mode compared with the off-plan house accounts for about 11% of the total land price; the capital occupation cycle has been extended from half a year to one year in the past to more than two years.

On the whole, the plot dimension presents the scale differentiation of "overall miniaturization and more concentrated premium". This differentiation is essentially the result of the continuous pragmatic land acquisition logic of real estate enterprises. Under the background that the whole industry is still in a period of deep adjustment, real estate enterprises strictly take profit certainty and capital safety as the core criteria, and give priority to selecting projects with "small volume, mature supporting facilities and clear accounting".

For the local land supply side, appropriately reducing the scale of a single plot, splitting complex comprehensive plots, and increasing the supply proportion of small and medium-sized pure residential plots may become an important direction to improve the transfer efficiency and activate market participation in the future.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Ding Zuyu Comments on the Real Estate Market", written by the Editorial Department and Puru Research, and published with authorization by 36Kr.