Based on per user unitary and rate control (PU2RC), this study presents a multi-mode transmission scheme for the multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) downlink systems with limited feedback. In the proposed scheme, the transmission mode, i.e., the number of data streams for simultaneous transmission, is adaptively chosen to maximize the ergodic sum rate of the system. Due to the difficulty in evaluating the ergodic sum rate, this paper derives an upper bound of the ergodic sum rate and uses it as the metric for transmission mode selection. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves better ergodic sum rate performance than the conventional PU2RC scheme, especially when the number of users in the system is not so large or the signal-to-noise ratio is high.