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GHOST CITY - Inside the Chinese Housing Bubble

ADVChina · 1.3M views · 2016-10-17 · 15:52

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Overview

ADVChina tours Chinese ghost cities and discusses the housing bubble, with speculative buyers purchasing empty apartments as investments.

On Hacker News

Linked in threads on China's property glut as visual evidence of empty, investment-driven housing, later seen as foreshadowing Evergrande.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2019–2023

Topics

Macroeconomics & financial crisesInvesting & personal finance
Search by tags
ghost citieschinareal estateproperty bubbleeconomics

What people said

Tade0 · 2019-02 · Recommendation

Is it because of speculative investment? Basically. Here's some helpful audiovisual material: [VIDEO] Around the 9:00 mark the get to the meat of the whole thing.

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_fat_santa · 2023-08 · Reference

This video[1] was posted about 6 years ago but I think were starting to see the effects of the bubble they were talking about. In the video they said most new apartments were bought as investments as real estate is seen as one of the only "safe" investments in China. It would be one thing if most of these buildings were occupied by residents and only a percentage was investment properties but it sounds like there were many buildings in these new cities where practically every unit was an "investment property". The problem is these "investment properties" stop being investments when everyone has one. [1]: [VIDEO]

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pound · 2019-02 · Reference

Here is video from serpentza/cmilk (2016) [VIDEO] talking a bit about it. Basically this is investment, with money often coming from the whole family. No one really lives there. In majority of cases even finishing touches on properties would be unwelcome as it will lower resale value. They are being built everywhere (helps with GDP too). And plenty of developers are struggling with sales of new stock.

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Sources

Video by ADVChina, played through YouTube.

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