Monday, July 28, 2008

Shanghai real estate

After checking out things on the web and talking to banks and locals, price will drop in the next while. Should wait. But this is a good time to look.

Since Jan, Guangzhou, Beijing and Shenzhen all saw their real estate value dropped by 30%. That's pretty significant. Shanghai seems to buck the trend; but there are signs that the sustaining downturn of the stock market is affecting people's wealth. The gov't rules also begin to bite into the runaway train of outrageous pricing. Some rules are: one person can only buy one apartment; if you use a joint, then you are out of luck for the second. Minimum down payment amount is raised as well.

From the Chinese real estate website, some of the expensive area are seeing price per sq meter dropping. But not sure why Xintiandi still ultra high at RMB100,000 per sq meter.

I am not though thinking the Shanghai real estate market will drop by 30%. This Shanghainese gov't tends to do things on its own and not with the central gov't that much. It's goal is to grow Shanghai. Seems there is a big project every two years. Now is Olympics, 2 years from now is World Expos, and 2 years after that is Disney. There have been lots of conferences about making Shanghai as the next financial hub. Keep this up, maybe; but still have a little commie thinking flare to it. Still can be odd in planning.

With the HSBC premier account, no need to transfer money into China for a mortgage. We can just pay from our HK account. That's good; as I don't like putting money into a place where "export" of currency is still restricted. We can get our pre-approval in 1 day if we needed. Hate to say this but I get better service with the Shanghai HSBC Premier branch than in HK. Go figure. There are three ways to get a mortgage for foreigner - US$ at about 5%, HK$ at about 5.5% or RMB$ at about 7.5%. The bank partners with some developers. If want to purchase, may have about 5% off the price. Of course, bank will levy any fees for processing the mortgage but quite small, about 0.0008%.

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