There Are Now Enough Vacant Properties In China To House Over Half Of America
December 17th, 2010Via: Business Insider:
Property stocks in China were weak today due to media reports that the Beijing and Shanghai authorities were investigating the high vacancy rate for Chinese property. Markets are worried they’ll be shocked by what they discover and clamp down on speculation even harder than they have.
How large might the vacancy problem be? Here’s a taste:
Finance Asia:
Recent statistics show that there are about 64 million apartments and houses that have remained empty during the past six months, according to Chinese media reports. On the assumption that each flat serves as a home to a typical Chinese family of three (parents and one child), the vacant properties could accommodate 200 million people, which account for more than 15% of the country’s 1.3 billion population. But instead, they remain empty. This is in part because many Chinese believe that a home is not a real home unless you own the flat.
And so people prefer buying to renting, and as a result, the rental yield is relatively low.
Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo
hmmmmmmm……wouldn’t that be an interesting social-engineering thought-exercise….about 40Mil un/under-employed Americans, ship them to China to occupy these vacant flats, maybe some kind of indentured servitude, teaching English, Spanish, Ebonics, slacking, whatever, maybe the expats pick up some of that Asian inscrutability and work-ethic, expand the gene pool through breeding programs….haha, ugly thinking, I know, I am being sarcastic/tongue in cheek….Factually, a friend with little college education is currently working in China, teaching English…he gets room and board and part of the requirements is he must learn Chinese! He is dating an Asian lady-friend (he is single, obv…) and I don’t think he is getting rich, but for a young single guy who hasn’t ever seen much of the world, it has been a nice adventure for him….
About 3 years ago I observed that my eldest grandson, who was in 8th grade at the time, was studying Chinese.
Half-jokingly, I asked a knowledgeable friend who teaches college finance and economics if the reason was because in the future the Chinese would be telling us what to do, or we would be telling the Chinese what to do. His reply:
The former.
this residential real estate glut is part of the China bubble. the biggest economic bubble of all time. but it’s not just flats. it’s factories, roads, shoping malls, steel mills, power stations, you-name-it. their GDP figures are more of a scam than the US. a lot more. the bursting of this bubble will finally bring down the US dollar. the end. (and the AUD. and the NZD.)
the end of the US dollar as the world reserve/trading currency is the end of the US as a federal entity. so, how many years do we have left? maybe up to five, max, i reckon.
@PeterofLoneTree
China wouldn’t be where it is today, whatever that means, without foreign direct investment from Western capitalists. International capital tells people what to do, not nation states. International capital went to China and India for the cheap labor and authoritarian governments. Their so-called “progress” is nothing more than the mass mobilization of slave labor, similar to how England and the U.S. were during their industrial revolutions.