By Alain Pinel General Manager of Intero Prestigio international Intero Real Estate Services, Inc. a Berkshire Hathaway Affiliate
HOUSE SHOPPING IN BEIJING IS…
…Not my favorite sport. Although, if you want to lose calories, it’s a pretty good workout. Burns a lot of time and energy. It’s a process. At the high end, it’s a ceremony. Better be organized and prepared. My advice: work with a real agent you really like because otherwise, by the time you’re done with house hunting, you may decide to never see the agent again (or look at another house…).
Lucky me, I had the best guide for a property tour. Yoga Yang is her name. She is a ChineseAmerican top producer with Intero in the Silicon Valley but spends quite a bit of time in the old country. She is my Wikipedia for everything China. Based on my search criteria, she selected a couple of luxury homes truly representative of what you can get for the money (when you have lots of it) in the Chinese capital. To be honest, I don’t have that kind of money to burn and had no intention to buy. Just wanted to get a free education on real estate values. Thank you for not telling the sellers. Before I take you on the tour, you might want to know a thing or two about the real estate business in China. Not quite what we are used to here, although the Chinese ways tend to progressively copy our model; laws permitting that is. China is an “open listing” market. More often than not, the broker who brings the buyer gets the whole thing. Hence the interest in fighting for buyers. Lianjia, the company we solicited for the tour, is No.1 in all of China with something like 13,000 agents and 8,000 offices located in 28 cities. They introduced the “exclusive listing” concept in China and are quite successful at
“selling” the exclusive agency as the best way to obtain a higher sale price. Pretty much the opposite of the narrative US brokers need to use to invite cooperation and stay clear of the “dual agency” bugaboo. The real estate market has been and still is a bit of a roller coaster in China. Hot areas may come and go, according to which strings are being pulled at any given time by a central administration eager to control growth and monitor risks. Lately, a series of regulations have been imposed against speculative property investments in order to cool transactions & price frenzy in top-tier cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. After a wild ride that saw the average price multiply more than 10 times over the last 10 years, both the number of sales and values are now somewhat stable or sliding a few percentage points. Today, the average price in Beijing, a sprawling and ever-changing metropolis of 25 million people, stands at about $1,000 per square foot, with top prices flirting with $3,000. Purchase restrictions and