Sunday, April 3, 2005

Lining up to buy an apartment At the ground floor of my aparment building a real estate developer set up a sales office for a new compound on the outskirts of Shanghai. I did not really pay attention to it, but it was often quite busy in there, they even set up a shuttle between the sales office and the building site. When I came back from my last trip I noticed lots of people sitting on plastic or wooden seats outside the sales office. They looked like typical waidiren (literally [OE]people from another place[base '], normally farmers or workers from outside Shanghai), wearing dirty old clothes and looking like they did not have a shower in a long time. It was nice weather, so I assumed that they were probably labourers resting a bit. However, when I came back late at night they were still sitting there, but now most were asleep. I asked the neighbours what was going on, and it turned out that the properties would go on sale this weekend and that people who wanted to buy an apartment had hired workers or unemployed people to sit in line for them. Because of Chinese regulations to reduce the economic growth, houses/apartments can only be sold after they have been partly built. In the past people could buy them even before the first stone was laid, but now they have to wait until the government approves the developer to sell them. I was told that some of the people had been sitting there for 5 days already! If you had nobody to sit in line for you, you might miss out on the chance to buy an apartment. Because prices are skyrocketing, many Shanghainese buy one or more apartments, it[base ']s still a great investment with high double digit price increases every year. A project manager at China Bay told me that she bought a new apartment 2 years ago for just over USD 100,000 and its value has more than doubled since! 12:25:59 AM    comment []