China’s once-booming property sector has reached a sobering new low, as China Evergrande Group, the giant whose spectacular rise and fall epitomized the country’s real estate dreams and disappointments, faces delisting from the Hong Kong stock exchange and the forced sale of its key assets. The events unfolding in August 2025 not only mark the end of an era for Evergrande but also serve as a cautionary tale for investors and policymakers grappling with the enduring fallout of China’s property crisis.
On August 13, 2025, court-appointed liquidators for China Evergrande Group announced they had hired UBS Group AG and Citic Securities Co. to seek buyers for Evergrande Property Services Group Ltd., a subsidiary valued at $1.1 billion. This move follows previous unsuccessful attempts to sell the property management arm, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke with Bloomberg. The urgency of the sale underscores the immense pressure liquidators face to extract value from Evergrande’s tangled web of assets—a process that has so far yielded only modest returns.
The decision to bring in heavyweight bankers comes just as another blow lands: Evergrande will be delisted from the Hong Kong stock exchange on August 25, 2025. The company’s shares had already been suspended for about a year and a half, since early 2024, nearly 16 years after its initial listing. The delisting marks a bleak milestone for China’s property sector, now entering its fourth year of paralysis, and continues to weigh heavily on the world’s second-largest economy.
The scale of Evergrande’s collapse is breathtaking. Once China’s largest developer by sales, the company was worth more than $50 billion at its 2017 peak. But after defaulting on a dollar bond in December 2021, Evergrande’s fortunes unraveled at dizzying speed. As reported by Bloomberg, the liquidators’ latest review revealed a debt load of about HK$350 billion (around $45 billion)—a figure much higher than previously disclosed. After more than a year combing through the company’s books and its sprawling network of entities, the liquidators concluded that a holistic restructuring is “out of reach.”
“It’s a symbolic moment for the mainland property sector,” said Kenny Ng, a strategist at China Everbright Securities International, in comments to Bloomberg. He added, “The drastic collapse will definitely leave a deep memory in all investors in the market.”
Evergrande’s demise is not an isolated event but the most dramatic chapter in a crisis that has dragged down China’s economic growth and spurred a record number of distressed builders. The property sector’s woes began in 2021, and the dominoes keep falling. On August 11, 2025, China South City Holdings Ltd. was ordered into liquidation by Hong Kong’s High Court after failing to win enough creditor support for its restructuring proposal. In total, at least six Chinese developers have faced wind-up orders from Hong Kong courts since the crisis began.
The numbers paint a stark picture. Evergrande is a behemoth comprising around 3,000 legal entities and approximately 1,300 projects under development in over 280 cities. Liquidators have taken control of more than 100 related companies, collectively holding assets valued at HK$27 billion. Yet, the realization of assets has been “modest,” totaling just $255 million so far, with $167 million linked to Evergrande but subject to complex ownership constraints, according to statements from the liquidators reported by Bloomberg.
The Evergrande Property Services Group Ltd., the focus of the current sale efforts, manages about 3,000 projects and is viewed by creditors as a “very substantial potential source of value.” The liquidators have emphasized that this asset is being given “the highest priority” in their efforts to recover funds. However, the tangled nature of Evergrande’s corporate structure means that stakeholders cannot assume all realized funds will be available to the company. Deloitte previously estimated that the recovery rate for Evergrande’s offshore unsecured creditors stands at a meager 3.53%.
The crisis has not only shaken investor confidence but has also revealed deeper structural issues in China’s property market. Declining consumer confidence, oversupply, and mounting debt have all contributed to stalled real estate recovery efforts, despite government stimulus. Data from China Real Estate Information Corp. showed that new-home sales by the 100 largest developers have fallen more than 20% for two consecutive months in 2025. Analysts, including those at UBS Group AG, have pushed back their expectations for a market recovery to mid-to-late 2026.
Calls for further policy support have grown louder as the slump drags on. Yet, the Communist Party’s Politburo refrained from introducing new property stimulus measures at a recent meeting, even as the Chinese economy showed surprising resilience in the face of US tariffs. This cautious approach has left both developers and investors in limbo, unsure when—or if—the market will regain its footing.
The sheer complexity of Evergrande’s liquidation process has set a precedent for other developers facing similar fates. The firm’s vast network—3,000 legal entities and thousands of projects—means that unwinding its operations is a monumental task. The liquidators’ experience with Evergrande is now serving as a road map for other troubled companies in the sector. About $150 billion of debt from China’s developers has fallen into distress, and some, like Sunac China Holdings Ltd., are even pursuing second debt overhaul plans after initial restructuring attempts failed.
The ripple effects of Evergrande’s delisting are already being felt across the market. “The announcement of Evergrande’s delisting could add more pressure to mainland builder shares still trading,” Kenny Ng told Bloomberg. He warned, “It’s a lesson to investors alerting them to spend more time to understand a company’s business when earnings are growing too fast and to study policy shifts.”
For many, the end of Evergrande’s public trading is more than a financial event—it’s a turning point that forces a reckoning with the risks and realities of China’s property-driven growth model. The company’s spectacular rise and equally dramatic fall have left a trail of unfinished buildings, unpaid creditors, and anxious homeowners across hundreds of cities. As liquidators race to salvage what value they can, the rest of the sector—and indeed, the global investment community—watches closely, hoping to glean lessons from the wreckage.
With Evergrande’s delisting and the fire sale of its property management arm, China’s property crisis has entered a new and uncertain phase. The coming months will reveal whether policymakers, creditors, and market participants can chart a path forward, or if further turbulence lies ahead in the world’s second-largest economy.
