3 ms·

Using Chongqing as example is kinda cheeky, it's a west side big city, but a rare one in which speculators haven't found the runaway success seen in other ones.

• seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Chongqing is crazy overbuilt, which is weird since everything is so hilly there (think Seattle or San Francisco and then add even more hills). A lot of the speculation is along the lines that China is quickly urbanizing and farmers will eventually buy these apartments, but the farmers aren’t really rich enough to support the returns the speculators are looking for. Chengdu is probably in a similar boat to Chongqing. Well, any tier 2 city actually.
  • dis-sys 7y ago
    > Well, any tier 2 city actually. Just came back from Hangzhou, the entire city is flooded with people in their early 20s. I think the speculation is mainly on those annual 10 million university graduates joining the workforces. Farmers are not going to buy those apartments in tier-2 cities, their sons/daughters with university degrees sometimes at postgraduate level are the ones buying.
    • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
      There isn’t an infinite supply of those graduates. In fact, China is in for a serious demographic crunch over the next few years. Those kids are mostly from the cities anyways, rural education still has a long way to go (never met anyone at work in Beijing with a rural hukou, but maybe they just wouldn’t talk about that).
    • whoevercares 7y ago
      Hangzhou is tier-1, for sure.
      • seanmcdirmid 7y ago
        Effectively ya, officially no. Zhejiang is rich in general.