For Shanghai resident Kong Jiongjiong, a missed opportunity meant the difference between a windfall and a potential loss.
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Kong, a journalist, paid 1.5 million yuan (US$206,289) in 2015 for a 50-square-metre (538 sq ft) flat in Shanghai’s Hongkou district, using her life savings and loans from a bank. Just months later, a nearby parcel of land was sold at a record price of 70,000 yuan per square metre, more than double what she paid.
She hesitated to sell, believing prices would go higher.
But the momentum did not last. China’s central bank, worried about an asset bubble, unleashed market-cooling measures in the summer of 2018 to clamp down on prices.
That was followed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which drove China’s property prices into their worst slump in decades – and they have yet to recover.
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“I honestly don’t know where the bottom is,” Kong said. “Once you’ve experienced the highs, it’s hard to believe the market will really keep falling. You keep thinking, maybe it’ll bounce back soon.”
China’s residential property market, like a vessel that had just begun to steady itself, is once again facing renewed waves of uncertainty amid Trump’s tariffs, which threaten to unleash a new era of doubt for China’s economy – as well as its exporters and manufacturers. The tentative bottom of the market, as indicated by several months of transactions and narrowed declines in prices, appears to be slipping away.