Investor confidence in China’s troubled property sector has been rocked again this week by reports that one of the country’s largest private building conglomerates missed interest payments on two bonds.
What most people outside China don’t understand is that real-estate has been one big scam. See, developers have been building skycrapers filled with condos. They tell the chinese people “Westerners are investing in second homes - it’s a great nest egg investment for retirement! The property values will increase over time!”
The problem is that in the Chinese culture, people do not want to move into homes furnished by someone else. They want to customize and build the home to their own needs. As such all these condos are essentially empty - just bare walls with no trim, no paint, no furnishings, no kitchen cabinets, appliances, etc. It’s not a “home” it’s an empty canvas to build whatever you want…
Except it turns out nobody wants to live in an empty ghost town filled with shoddy constructed skyscrapers.
So that’s how you end up with households that own 4-5 ‘homes’ which are really just empty condos in empty skyscrapers that nobody wants. And now many people are waking up to the ruse and simply refusing to pay their mortgages on these second/third/fourth homes. Which is resulting in many major developers going bankrupt. (There have been multiple, but here’s the latest developer in china flashing warning signs - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-property-developer-guangzhou-rf-faces-bankruptcy-restructure-demand-2023-07-13/ )
Oh and fun side note - many venture capitalists inside America saw these developers building all these skyscrapers in China and decided to invest in these huge corporations. A fair amount of large financial institutions have bet big on these developers in China, and are going to lose their asses as these developers go bankrupt. It is already having a ripple effect on the US Stock Market as well.
Dude there’s literally dozens of apartments in my village that aren’t on the market because they’ve been bought by people friends with the local government to push the prices up on the dwindling number of available flats.
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What most people outside China don’t understand is that real-estate has been one big scam. See, developers have been building skycrapers filled with condos. They tell the chinese people “Westerners are investing in second homes - it’s a great nest egg investment for retirement! The property values will increase over time!”
The problem is that in the Chinese culture, people do not want to move into homes furnished by someone else. They want to customize and build the home to their own needs. As such all these condos are essentially empty - just bare walls with no trim, no paint, no furnishings, no kitchen cabinets, appliances, etc. It’s not a “home” it’s an empty canvas to build whatever you want…
Except it turns out nobody wants to live in an empty ghost town filled with shoddy constructed skyscrapers.
So that’s how you end up with households that own 4-5 ‘homes’ which are really just empty condos in empty skyscrapers that nobody wants. And now many people are waking up to the ruse and simply refusing to pay their mortgages on these second/third/fourth homes. Which is resulting in many major developers going bankrupt. (There have been multiple, but here’s the latest developer in china flashing warning signs - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-property-developer-guangzhou-rf-faces-bankruptcy-restructure-demand-2023-07-13/ )
You can read more here - https://www.wired.com/2016/02/kai-caemmerer-unborn-cities/
Oh and fun side note - many venture capitalists inside America saw these developers building all these skyscrapers in China and decided to invest in these huge corporations. A fair amount of large financial institutions have bet big on these developers in China, and are going to lose their asses as these developers go bankrupt. It is already having a ripple effect on the US Stock Market as well.
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Dude there’s literally dozens of apartments in my village that aren’t on the market because they’ve been bought by people friends with the local government to push the prices up on the dwindling number of available flats.