Are they actually underwater or do they just have higher loan payments than rental income? If it's the latter, let them sell some properties or transfer them to the bank in lieu of loan payments.
Another alternative is for the real estate trust to sell new shares into the market and use the money to pay the bank, or pay the bank in new shares. That dilutes the existing shareholders but doesn't force a fire sale of the properties.
In Dutch, interest is actually called 'rente'.
It's China, the authorities will just say "no." and then jail anyone who asks again.
Whether thing backing the credit to the seller's checking account is a mortgage loan or the deed to the property likewise has no effect on the amount of cash in their vault.
Now, if everybody is selling every building at a large discount, that's a housing crash, and highly-leveraged real estate companies are toast. But that should only happen if there is a real estate bubble, in which case a market correction is ultimately necessary and the entities that buy at the peak of the market are supposed to lose their shirts.
What you want to do in that case is not to save them. They're done. What you want is to prevent a cascading failure into the rest of the economy.
They have hundreds of thousands of unfinished apartments, and no money to finish them.
And even if they could, no one wants to buy the unsold apartments.
The average person in China owns more housing than the average person in the US or the EU.
This, with house prices being roughly equal but incomes being 1/6th on average, and there being about ~2.5B unfinished sqft of space (~2 sqft per person), and a rapidly shrinking population.
You do the math. Houses have been in a massive bubble in China for a long time, on nearly the same level as the Japanese bubble.
Who knows if it's finally going to pop. But the writing definitely seems on the wall now.
As a result, nobody can sell. The only way to move any inventory is to dramatically slash the price. Everyone is doing this, so you gotta do it even more than the next guy (or just hold on to the property but what if you need the money/can't maintain the property?). I've heard of 2mn rmby apartments in beijing going for 100k
They might have some properties that are not collateral, but even selling those imposes a problem: in the current market, most likely they will be sold well below book value. This automatically devaluates the value of any other property which they would like to use in the future for collateral and it will make existing lenders very nervous as well.