Why I REFUSE to buy Property in China

[Music] Here I am sitting in arguably the most important city in China I know most people especially when I started making my videos when I said I lived in Shenzhen most people thought well where shinjin what is hemmed-in I used to get a lot of questions everybody knows Shanghai Beijing the big ones Hong Kong but of course nobody really knew Shan Jen but Shenzhen is at least in my opinion the most important city in China because China would not be what it is today without Shenzhen since I got to Shenzhen which is about 10 years ago I know it is it's more than 10 years ago now I've seen so much change it's been incredible it's actually quite astounding it's all down to this guy over here then shall ping the guy who opened up China that's why there's this massive portrait of him here which has always kept in very good condition and if we take a look at it you can see there is got the Civic Center over there and a couple of the big landmark buildings which of course another new ones you know anyway what I'm trying to get out here is that okay basically the amount of change I've seen in Shenzhen has been astounding when I got here the subway system consisted of two lines and look like this now it looks like this and in fact there are even more subway lines opening up tomorrow I have seen shopping malls get flattened completely knocked down and new ones pop up in their place I've seen whole areas of the city get built from nothing and I've seen a huge amount of growth and a huge amount of wealth I see Ferraris and Lamborghinis every day it's just one of those places where there's a lot of wealth and I think most of China's millionaires live in Shenzhen if I am I stand to be corrected but I think I read that somewhere recently anyway what I'm trying to get out here is I get our stuff and very very often why haven't you bought property in Shenzhen because the prices of property in Xinjiang have always been going up mean literally since I got here they have skyrocketed I don't know how many hundreds of percent they just keep going up and up and up and it's almost like every year the property price is double something like that it's it's out it's absolutely ridiculous actually so I'm on my way to the first apartment I rented here in Shenzhen to show you the first reason why I refuse to buy property in China right now the first reason why I refuse to buy property here is the quality now standing in the sort of communal Gardens of the complex that I first moved into the first nice apartment I moved into when I got to Shenzhen probably in about December of 2006 and yeah it's in horrible disrepair you know was very nice and clean and swanky when I moved in but after or even about three years you know for instance these water features here which you know you serve water in them but after three years they just dried up and never seemed to get filled again so that stopped straightaway you just look at things like you know the pavements cracked never been fixed and well here you could see like all the mold and and whatever on the pillars here this is just a you know a very basic idea that you know things are not maintained is what I'm getting at all right now what I'm not trying to point out here is the sort of state of disrepair although I wanted you to see that that is very common in there's a communal area because this is all outside and basically any kind of shared area community area will always degrade because people don't want to take responsibility for anything that isn't theirs there is a management company that's supposed to kind of do the upkeep here but management fees aren't actually very high in China so they don't really have an incentive to do so and the management companies of these buildings they generally change quite often so what happens is you'll get a construction company comes and builds this massive new project they put lots of nice things in here there used to be a fantastic gym restaurants internet cafe all the kind of thing here on the third floor now there's nothing it's all turned off all the lights are off nothing works and that's kind of common for any apartment complex so when it's new it seems very attractive and it's something that you think yes I'd love to move in here I'd love to buy a property here or an apartment however it takes maybe a year maybe three years and it's all gone to excuse my language but that's just how China works and the quality of the materials used to build these buildings are very poor so you will find cracks in your walls your plumbing will kind of start leaking you know your electricity will often sort of just flake out or break so even in this very posh because this is a very posh we're not going to lie this is don't forget we are in Shenzhen here it's not like a small little second third fourth tier city Schengen is on the par with Beijing Shanghai and Guangzhou it is a first tier city it's home of the most millionaires in China and yet this building which is a very expensive building it costs millions of RMB to buy an apartment here and the rent here is around about I guess starts at around about 6,000 RMB a month and this is the quality you can expect you can expect your wallpaper to peel off you can expect your plumbing to be bad you're because I had to replace even when the brand-new apartment I moved in to I had to replace faucets you know taps that just broke off I had water seeping through the wall at one point because a pipe had you know ruptured inside the wall to deal with well all sorts of things that you will not not expect from a brand new building in a first-tier city so that's number one quality is definitely poor and it doesn't matter where you go in China doesn't matter how new or how fancy the building looks the quality is going to be subpar and it's not going to last so that's why I won't buy property in China number one let's get on to the second reason make some of my first videos looking over this view over here so I'd like to get on to the final point as to why I'll never buy a property in China and it's basically down to greed you know Chinese tradition kind of forces people into buying property if they want to get married which is very good I think it's good to have stability in your marriage and it's a good idea and that's all good and well but people are no longer buying property just as a sort of an investment for stability or something property has become the only surefire way for people to invest money and make a good return so instead of just buying one property and keeping it as an investment living there and you know maybe later down the line selling it and upgrading people are on this massive sort of greedy grab for as much as they can get it's basically stems back to the recent history in China where people were all starving and there wasn't a lot to go around so I guess now that there is a lot to go around people want to grab as much as they can so what people are doing now is they're buying multiple properties and it's boosted the economy amazingly so of course all this money going into buying properties and then these construction companies are building new you know office blocks and new residential apartments mainly all over the place creating jobs and it's really healthy for the economy but the problem is it overheats all the time it gets too hot it's too much debt then the government will put restrictions in like married couples are only a lot of two apartments so what do they do they get divorced on paper so they can then buy more and then they put another restriction saying are the banks can only lend you this amount of money or you have to pay a certain amount of deposit up front for your second and third property so what do they do they go and borrow money from shadow banks and from loan sharks and things like that to buy more property so what's happening here is this massive massive amount of debt is being built up now the government does know that it has to keep the property market going otherwise the economy is going to have a massive downturn so they step in every time it's going to burst every time that but bubble is about to burst they step in and give some kind of stimulus I going interest-free loans or they'll throw something in there so you know everybody here has faith that the government will keep everything on the up-and-up and that the property prices will continue to rise which is very dangerous in my point of view thing is so far they've been sticking to it and no one's really lost out so it's just feeling it more and more and Who am I to say whether or not they're going to be able to keep it up or not it's just to me when people start getting really greedy and it's very apparent that's when things are about to go wrong just like with the stock market here actually two weeks before it crashed I made a video telling everybody there you know just cool off because I could see even sort of illiterate grannies on the street street sweepers were playing the stock market on their phones just when something is a sure thing in China everybody jumps on the bandwagon and that's what's happening with property so I wouldn't buy it because I don't believe that the property price is what you pay for you don't get what you pay for first of all you get a concrete box in the sky which doesn't belong to you it's only a 70 year lease from the government and the quality of the construction is abysmal it's terrible I could build something better myself so I'm just appalled basically so that's the deal on the end all that's do why I would never buy property in China but I would like to tell you guys that there's a little bit more of an in-depth discussion on this that seemed okay myself did when we visited a ghost town which is the result of people not being able to buy property here because it's too expensive so they go to the second third fourth tier cities and buy up property there as investment so if you want to see what that's like firsthand there's a link here go take a look and you can find a little more in-depth about this subject all of my Chinese friends have money riding on the property market here every single one of them own at least one property and so I honestly hope that the property market actually just mellows out and the pigeon stables up levels out and that it can continue to be a good source of investment here I just wish people weren't so greedy because it's really causing a problem here and I really do fear for the livelihoods of all of my Chinese friends so whatever happens guys whether this continues to grow whether it flattens out whether it slowly declines or whether it actually collapses either way only time will tell none of us can predict the future and until next time guys as always whatever you doing whether or not you've invested in property stay awesome [Music]

Channel: serpentza

Views: 1,023,744

Rating: 4.8076215 out of 5

Keywords: buying property in China, Serpentza, property, China, Chinese real estate, economic crash, Poor quality, overheating market, overpriced apartments, buying a chinese apartment, cost of living, cost of apartment, cost of Chinese real estate, debt bubble, shenzhen, Housing bubble, chinese, economic crisis, debt crisis, Housing market, Winston Sterzel, adventure, bikes, beer, Property market, economy, nail house, Chinese apartment, nail houses, Chinese bubble, GDP, Debt, Property bubble

Id: _lAoTBVTTO8

Length: 12min 8sec (728 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 28 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/BattleRushGaming]

Published on Oct 28, 2016

Nice DD 3 years late

[u/nadir1991]

lmao. You can't buy Chinese property as a foreigner.

[u/Lucasthecryptonerd]

Yeah HK is insane in particular. A small two bedroom apartment can set you back £2mm ($2.5mm USD). It's about time we see a drop in prices, but that can't happen until the Chinese billionaires stop chucking shitloads of money into the market.