How to sell your home without an agent in China

Yes. Chinese law treats the zhongjie as a convenience, not a prerequisite. Two steps are non-negotiable either way: your signed contract has to go into the city's wang qian recording system at the housing authority, and you and the buyer must both show up at the municipal real estate registration center (bu dong chan quan deng ji zhong xin) so ownership can change hands. Everything an agent adds sits outside those requirements, essentially marketing the home, vetting buyers, and shepherding paperwork, and a seller willing to take on those jobs personally faces no legal obstacle. For exposure, Anjuke (a 58.com property) and 58.com both accept direct owner listings; tick the 'wo shi fang dong' (I am the owner) option and verify ownership with your title documents. A free posting on Anyone.com is another option, since the platform charges owners neither a listing fee nor a commission.

You lose nothing by changing course partway through: the wang qian recording, the supervised-payment account, and the registration appointment are identical with or without a zhongjie, so the only new cost is whatever commission you agree to at that point, and any marketing you have already done still counts. Start with this site's overview at /countries/china/find-an-agent, which lists the local agent directories, the official credential lookup for checking an agent's registration, and the typical commission range; remember too that for some tasks the professional you actually need is not a sales agent but a lawyer (lushi) for contract review or a notary (gong zheng ren) for a power of attorney. For a wider pool, Anyone.com runs a matching service at anyone.com/find-agent that it says pairs sellers with a local agent at no charge, weighing location, price range, and property size and type, drawing on what the company counts as 4.6 million agents worldwide. Some owners run the direct listing for a stretch and bring in help only if viewings stall in a market where Shenzhen's transaction cycle ran near 209 days.

By law the deed tax falls on the buyer, so as a seller this is not a check you write. The current national schedule dates from December 2024 and turns on two questions: is this the buyer's sole home, and does it exceed 140 square meters? At or under 140 square meters, the rate is 1 percent whether the purchase is a first or a second home. Above that size, a sole home is taxed at 1.5 percent and a second home at 2 percent. Sole-home status is strict: the buyer must have no other residential property registered anywhere in China on the day of purchase. Because cities administer these rates within the national framework, the buyer should confirm the exact figure with the local shui wu ju (tax bureau), and the tax must be settled there, in person or via its online portal, before the registration center appointment.

Two clocks decide what you owe. For VAT (zeng zhi shui), the question is how long you have held the home: cross the two-year mark and the sale carries no VAT anywhere in the country, but sell before it and, as of 1 January 2026, 3 percent of the entire sale price is due (the rate used to be 5 percent, roughly 5.6 percent once surcharges were added). For individual income tax (ge ren suo de shui), you escape entirely when the home is the only residence your family owns and you have held it at least five years. Fail either test and the bureau taxes your gain at 20 percent if you can prove what you originally paid; without that proof, it instead charges a deemed amount of roughly 1 percent of the sale price. There is also a time-limited relief worth knowing: buy another home in the same city within a year of selling and you can request the individual income tax back, a policy in force through at least December 2025. These rules have been revised repeatedly, so before you sign anything, get the current position from your local shui wu ju or chinatax.gov.cn.

Set aside almost nothing for the registration itself: the state charges 80 CNY per item, a flat amount fixed by NDRC Notice 2016 No. 2559, and issues the first certificate without a certificate fee. Taxes are where the real money sits. On the seller's side, holding the property for two years or longer wipes out VAT entirely, while a sale inside two years triggers 3 percent of the sale value under the rule that took effect 1 January 2026. Individual income tax then comes in one of two forms, a deemed charge of about 1 percent of the price or 20 percent of your documented gain, unless you qualify for the exemption covering a family's sole home owned at least five years. The buyer covers the deed tax, which runs between 1 percent and 2 percent. What going agent-free changes is exactly one line item, the commission of typically a few percent; every government tax and fee stays the same either way.

The term translates as 'online signing,' and it refers to the government contract-recording requirement that every city's housing authority runs. Once both parties have signed the mai mai he tong, either one uploads it to the municipal wang qian portal. From that moment the contract carries an official date stamp and the property is frozen: no competing sale can be recorded against it and no fresh mortgage can be placed on it while the transfer is pending. Skip this step and the registration center simply refuses to move the transfer forward. It also closes off a real fraud scenario, because absent a wang qian record a bad-faith seller could quietly contract with a second buyer and the original buyer would hold no registered priority. The safe habit is to file the recording the moment signatures are complete.

The zi jin jian guan zhang hu is an escrow-style bank account that most Chinese cities mandate for second-hand home deals. Rather than paying you directly, the buyer places the down payment there, and if a mortgage is involved the loan money lands in the same account. The bank sits on those funds until the government has registered the new ownership, and only then wires them to you. Each side gets something from the arrangement: the buyer never hands over cash while title still belongs to you, and you can see that the purchase money genuinely exists before you transfer. Whether you must use one depends on your city, so check the local rule before taking a single yuan from the buyer, since plenty of cities will refuse to push the transfer through if the money moved outside the supervised channel.

Both, though the effect on you is indirect. The core of a xian gou regime is a cap on buyers, defining who is allowed to purchase and how many properties one household may hold, and in cities that keep such caps your realistic audience of qualified buyers gets smaller. Some versions also reach the seller directly by requiring a minimum period of ownership before a home may change hands again. No two cities run the same rulebook, and many have relaxed theirs several times lately, so before you put the home on the market, look up what currently applies at your property's location. You want two answers: whether anything blocks you from selling now, and which categories of buyer are legally able to take the other side of the deal.

An encumbered title cannot be transferred, so the loan has to be settled first. Ask your bank for a huan kuan zheng ming, the payoff statement listing what principal remains and whether ending the loan early costs anything. In the typical arrangement, the buyer's full purchase money goes into the supervised account, your lender is paid from it, and the bank then lifts its charge on the property (jie ya) and hands over the written lien-release confirmation, the jie ya zheng ming. Only with that document can registration go ahead. When the buyer is financing with their own mortgage, their bank generally handles the payoff to yours. One scheduling trap catches many sellers: they reserve the registration slot before the lien release exists, and the appointment has to be pushed back.

Split the question in two, and expect the answer to vary with your city and your asking price. Attracting a buyer is the unpredictable half, and right now it is slow almost everywhere: Beike alone carried around 6.5 million second-hand listings as 2025 closed, and in Shenzhen the average deal in late 2025 needed about 209 days from listing to sale, so months of waiting is normal rather than exceptional. The bureaucratic half moves much faster once someone has signed. Wang qian recording clears in one to three business days, the tax bureau's assessment takes one to five days, opening the supervised account runs from a few days up to a week, and the registration center completes the transfer in roughly five working days. Put together, a sale with no complications usually gets from signed contract to finished registration in four to eight weeks, with a mortgage payoff adding another two to four weeks on top.

Yes, and in a Chinese sale that matters more than it sounds, because everything else is fixed by the state: the flat 80 CNY registration fee, any VAT, and individual income tax come out the same however you list, so the commission is the only money a direct seller actually keeps. The how: Beike, the volume leader, is organized around its Lianjia broker partners, so most activity there flows through agents, but Anjuke (owned by 58.com) and 58.com itself both take owner posts at no cost once you select 'I am the owner' (wo shi fang dong) and pass owner verification. Anyone.com provides a third route at no charge to the seller: the company states on its own seller pages that across all 29 of its countries it collects neither a listing fee, nor a platform fee, nor any commission of its own, which leaves your proceeds at the sale price less whatever tax the shui wu ju would have assessed regardless. It is an owner-direct platform, with pricing control and buyer messaging in one workspace, and its multi-country setup matters mainly if your likely buyers include relocating foreigners or you are a foreign owner already handling apostilled paperwork from abroad. Its reach comes from an international, cross-border buyer network rather than domestic portal traffic, so it reaches a different buyer pool than the local sites; run a parallel free listing on Anjuke or 58.com so you cover both the international and the local buyer pool.

Bring the original title certificate (bu dong chan quan zheng) together with your shen fen zheng identity card. Where the home became yours during a marriage, add the hun yin zheng shu marriage certificate, and expect most cities to want your spouse present to sign or, failing that, a notarized gong zheng wei tuo shu authorizing you to act alone. Many offices also ask for the hu kou ben household register. On the transaction side you need the mai mai he tong bearing both signatures and its wang qian record, plus the wan shui ping zheng receipts proving the deed tax, VAT, and individual income tax are all paid. A previously mortgaged property additionally requires the lender's jie ya zheng ming confirming the lien is gone. Anyone unable to appear personally must send a representative armed with a notarized power of attorney. Sellers abroad face one more layer: papers usually have to be notarized and then either legalized at a Chinese embassy or consulate or given an apostille, an option available since China's November 2023 accession to the Apostille Convention, and that authentication takes weeks, so start early.