There's no credible estimates remotely alleging ~500 million vacant homes. Excess PRC square footage in housing inventory is enough for 100-150m people. About

There's no credible estimates remotely alleging ~500 million vacant homes. Excess PRC square footage in housing inventory is enough for 100-150m people. About 10 years of urbanization headroom. PRC continuing trend to urbanize from 65%->80/80% still has to resettle 200-300m to urban areas. This is without accounting for deprecated housing stock. Yes reality of speculation and (mis)allocation is much messier, but PRC is still 100-150m short on urban housing, they just also have a very wasteful 100-150m decade long housing runway. For reference 80% urbanized US is short on ~6M homes, that's 2% relative to population. PRC gunning for 80% urbanization = PRC is net short 7-10%. Realistically much higher since a lot of people in rural stuck in very shitty housing stock. I mean that's their choice, and economics of relocating people who can't afford new homes is going to be... interesting. But part of urbanization goal is to move 100s in prexisting shitty tier5 homes into modern housing. Especially elderly whose going to be in <2 people households.