Shopping for a place

Well, the inevitable is here; the rental contract is coming up; we are in the middle of debating continue for another 1 year, 2 year or 3 year rent at the current place or buy. So we spent the entire afternoon and evening doing the couple thing.

I surfed the Chinese real estate websites checking the latest news and the vast sale database. Very time consuming. Two people we knew that bought had looked at over 80 locations "in person"!!!! Price right now is definitely too high, bubble high! We went looking for some rental apartments with the range of RMB8,000 per month rent. Only managed getting into one. Yuck! Low ceiling, dark, windows wrong height, main bathroom was in the second bathroom with washer and dryer - Chinese styled tiles, the main bedroom had a half bath with tiles from floor to ceiling - white, long and narrow. I instantly ready to puke! Not because of the ugly factor; it had no windows, long, narrow, cold. It reminded me of the funeral parlor's inner room where my grandmother's body lied in wait for burial. Exactly the same :-( Then the closets, dirty plywood shelves with no finishing; I could see 3 years worth of dust and unfinished. Still had the original plywood rough edges. Funny. This building had mostly foreigner. What, a hostel? Then, we tried other apartments but couldn't get in because no one worked on weekends. Go figure. Then we managed getting into a health club adjacent to this one apartment block; membership is RMB1,800 if one lives in the apartment; cheap. And that went with the facility. Weight room, worst I had seen. Dark, worn out carpet - dark, 3 or 4 machines facing a draped dark wall. Then the swimming pool. To gain access, I went thru the men's locker room. Yuck! Tiles with dirty floor; then this one guy shaving in the hot tub; using the tub as the razer rinsing basin. Then walking up the stairs to the pool area, broken concrete with broken tiles. Suddenly, all foreigners lounging around.... To me, seemed like I had entered a time warp going back to a 3rd world country club with foreigners pretending the 1 star place as 5 star resort.

As I was thinking, price range with that in the Jing An area is really bad, or the real estate agents are giving the bottom of the piles.

I am checking apartments to purchase now; get the money to work for me. After some math calculations, seems the market maybe at a bubble. Or has already getting there. On average a 100 sq meters apartment is about RMB2.5M. That's the low end. Some higher end ones are about RMB3.5M to RMB4.0M. Some with RMB500 per month for management fee. NO final decision yet.

So the saga continues.