Thinking of buying a house in China? It's a trap!
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You only have to look at the mad rush to invest in the stock market a few years ago to see the same blind belief that they couldn't lose and the inevitable tears that followed.
Take for instance the uncertainty of what will happen when your 70-year lease expires.
Will you have to pay a small fee? A percentage of the value of your property.
No one knows what will be required, thanks to the removal of the line in a draft law guaranteeing the automatic free 70-year renewal. That's a fairly big uncertainty to have been hanging over what is probably the biggest purchase you will ever make.
Even if you decide to overlook the huge disparity of average income to average price, there really is no sensible reason for property prices to be so high when there are so many empty properties out there.
Data from China's National Bureau of Statistics shows that there was 191.8 million square meters of unsold property as of June 2010.
Various studies using electricity, water and gas meters as indicators of whether a house was empty have shown that the number of privately owned properties that are empty could be as high as 27 percent.
The combination of these two figures is truly frightening.
With official inflation running at 4.4 percent, which doesn't take into account house price inflation, there's pressure on the government to take action, but so far the measures have only slowed the rising prices a little.
I wouldn't be too surprised if this resulted in a rise in interest rates, which is only going to add more pressure to the housing market.
And let's not forget the quality of the building standards. Qiu Baoxing, vice minister of housing and urban-rural development, stated earlier that the average life span of China's low rise buildings was only 25-30 years.
So you can probably expect a number of problems with your house from the start.
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