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Anecdote about real estate in china

 A recently divorced engineer friend of mine wanted a new start in life.  His kids are grown and he was basically looking for "something new to do".  His company was desperate to have a senior engineer in China to oversee the production of some of their goods until it is relocated to Mexico... yes that's happening.

It is a 5-year contract, the first two will be in China and the last three will be in Mexico.  After the Covid lockdown went away a few weeks ago, he was ready to leave (He's had four shots against Covid already), and he arrived about three weeks ago.

He was first in a Holiday Inn hotel, but he is now renting an apartment.  Hence the story.  It is well known that in china apartments that are for investment purposes are "unfinished" this is intentional it's a Chinese thing, still, in the big cities there are apartments for rent.  In this case, someone had died and the apartment was available.

This is a newish building dating back to maybe 2015 and very very quiet with few lights visible at night.  The average sales price for each apartment was about US$ 1.5 million.  large apartments with several bedrooms.  He pays 4,000 Yuan per month or the equivalent of US$ 1,000.00 which is considered expensive, but then he's not Chinese and it was fully furnished (maybe not to his taste but he didn't have to add anything).  

What is interesting here is for information purposes what is the market value for the apartment:  

(1)  Everyone told him he was paying too much rent (he didn't really care since it was very convenient and short-term).

(2)  Rent is US$1,000.00 per month, including electricity and heating.  

The question, therefore, is what is the value of the apartment?  The owner had been trying to sell it for the past 12 months for $ 3 million dollars.  For fun, he looked up locally available apartments (secondary market) and the price at which they sell.  All of them were shown as vacant never occupied units and were priced in the 2-3 million range.

We were "speaking" via WhatsApp for the past few days and we came to the following conclusion:

In New York City you can expect a rental rate of return of 3%, and in New Jersey about 5%, applying these figures to this gross rental figure, we get a notional value in NYC of $ 400k and $240k for New Jersey.  So my friend's apartment in NYC would be worth only 400k but then again at $1,000 a month, you don't get a three-bedroom apartment in NYC...

The prime rate in China, today is 4%, this is not available to mortgage owners, but let's say that the actual cost of money for that $ 2 million apartment is 5%, then the owners pay $100k per annum in interest expenses.

There are many differences between China and New York city, there is no doubt, first, this city is not NYC it's a smaller (population of about 10 million) city in the south of China.  It is a nice apartment but nothing fancy.  It feels like a ghost town as far as he can see maybe 20% of apartments are occupied, but again it's hard to say, the Chinese work hard with long hours still he has never seen or heard of any neighbors on his floor (granted he's been there for two weeks), still at $1,000 a month it's hard to justify a price of 3 million.

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