Starting July 1, expats can apply online to purchase property in the capital, and will no longer need to present a hard copy version of the “Residence Status Certificate”.  All of the other basic requirements will remain the same.

To qualify, foreign applicants must have lived in China for at least one year and have the proper certifications issued by the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau. Foreigners are not permitted to own any other houses in China, and the property must be for their own residence (in other words, they can’t use it as an investment property by renting it out). Finally, foreigners must use their real names when buying houses in China. Any foreigner hoping to buy property in Beijing for anything beyond personal use is advised to first set up a foreign company.

With concerns over China’s booming real estate market, however, any prospective buyers are urged to proceed with caution.

For more on the process of buying a home in China, check out this guide. Inquiries can be made to the Public Security Bureau by telephoning 8402-0101.

The post It Just Got Easier for Foreigners to Buy a Home in Beijing appeared first on The Nanfang.

The collapse of an illegal basement belonging to a representative of the National People’s Conference last week revealed a new and disturbing trend in Beijing. In order to increase the size and value of their property, Beijing homeowners are building illegal basements. Mostly seen in the city’s east and west ends, basement construction is most prevalent among siheyuan, a traditional Beijing-style courtyard home.

Homeowners use reinforced concrete and steel to support their basements with ceilings only two meters high. While the doubled floor space can add up to 10 million yuan to the value of the home, the excavation involved in building these basements, risks the collapse of neighbouring properties. Basement expansions are illegal in Beijing, and no building permits are granted for such renovations.

Notwithstanding the risks involved, as well as the illegality of their construction, an industry insider surnamed Wang revealed that nothing is being done to prevent them:

Digging out your own basement is not about how much money you spend. Reinforced concrete isn’t the most valuable (resource here), what’s most valuable is the guanxi (relationships) that a family has that will prevent anyone from filing a report.

Mr. Zhang, a member of the Housing Agency, believes Guanxi is the key unspoken rule: Guanxi ensures that residents don’t inform authorities of the illegal construction and, conversely, prevents authorities from asking about them.

Photos: fznews

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Sixty-seven large and medium-sized cities saw prices drop from the year before, while prices rose in only three cities.

The secondary market wasn’t much better. Prices of second-hand real estate dropped in 65 out of 70 large and medium-sized cities, rose in four, and remained the same in another.

Photo: Caijing, xiangboshu

The post Is China’s Real Estate Bubble Bursting? appeared first on The Nanfang.

The Yale professor, who successfully predicted the collapse of America’s housing market, drew similarities between the two countries’ markets.

Caijing has more:

The professor used the housing price to income ratio to support his concern. People were buying homes at prices far beyond their income level in major Chinese cities like Shenzhen and Shanghai, he said. Computer analysis done in California showed the ratio stood at 10 times, meaning buyers were buying homes at prices tem times their income, which he thought was way too high.

The excessively high housing prices were partly supported by psychological bubbles, according to Professor Shiller. People chose to believe in a rising property market and were too eager to reap from the sector. Such bubbles, however, would not exist in the long run, and if they burst, buyers would have to suffer titanic losses, Shiller said.

Having made numerous trips to the middle kingdom, Shiller is also not a fan of China’s state-owned banks, which have long struggled to get out of the habit of paying out non-market oriented loans, according to Shenzhen Evening News.

Shiller has a track record of seeing through popular optimism to predict more realistic outcomes. He also successfully predicted the bursting of the dotcom bubble in the late 1990s.

Another thinker who believes that blind optimism has damaged America and the world is Barbara Ehrenreich, who in 2010 published “Bright Sided” (published in the U.K. as “Smile or Die”).

In spite of widespread hope that a crash will be averted, the belief that housing prices are forbiddingly high in China’s major cities is far from controversial. In 2010, property developer Ren Zhiqiang had a shoe thrown at him for saying out-of-touch things like “Chinese people are too rich, and houses are too cheap.”

One netizen caused a stir on Sina Weibo this week when he asked the mayor of Guangzhou how long it would take a person on his income to buy a place, according to Yangcheng Evening News. The mayor is yet to respond.

The post Nobel economics laureate pessimistic about Shenzhen’s housing market appeared first on The Nanfang.

The man is currently on trial for murder.

Moreover, the girl’s family are now demanding 8 million yuan in compensation from Wang Jiangyong after he was found lying next to his dead girlfriend in a rented room last December with a stab wound in his chest, Anhui Satellite Television reports.

Wang insists that he can only afford to pay a maximum of 50,000 yuan, and the money could turn out to be the least of his worries.

After he was arrested, Wang explained the suicide pact and how his girlfriend’s family would not accept him because he did not have steady employment.

On December 9, Wang and his Hunan girlfriend Xiao Jing (alias) bought two packets of cockroach poison, ate them in a hot pot and then lay down in bed in a rented room arm-in-arm, waiting to die. When they woke up the next morning, they realised they would need to seek another method.

During the small hours of December 11, they decided to stab each other. After they both stabbed each other near the left shoulder, they embraced and fell onto the bed, but he didn’t die.

Realising he would face murder charges, Wang then tried to poison himself with gas, but again didn’t succeed.

On Dec. 14, the landlord smelt gas coming from Wang’s room and had the door kicked down. He was found along with Xiao Jing’s body.

Prosecutors have questioned parts of Wang’s account. For example, he said his girlfriend was naked when he stabbed her, but the knife clearly penetrated the clothes she was wearing.

And to compound the sheer awfulness of the whole thing, Xiao Jing’s mother told the court that she would have approved of the relationship if it really made her daughter happy.

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