Comment Re:Not seeing it. (Score 1) 491
I can speak to the Chinese real estate bubble. It's--insane.
My wife (from China) and I bought an "apartment" (what we'd call a condo) for her parents five years ago in a suburb just on the outskirts of Shanghai, but on the light rail line. Price was 400,000 yuan (around $60k). Her parents are older, it was a much cleaner location for her father to live, better access to medical care, and so forth. This was 2004.
Cut to today, that apartment is (supposedly) worth 2 million yuan, ($300k, approximately), after 5 years. I've visited the community, it's nice, her father seems happy, mother slightly less so (it's hard for her sisters to make the trip on Shanghai transit), but enjoying running water and good electricity and things--the community lies within, in some ways, a Potemkin village.
Even better, several of the units in the 20-condo building with her parents, that's supposedly soaring in value, are vacant--one basement apartment was being used for storage for what appeared to be a convenience store.
Now, far as I'm concerned, the place is secure and not an investment. We're not going to sell or rent it, and when the inevitable crash comes, won't be a problem--but what I hear is driving sales of residential real estate is overseas Chinese buying up tons of properties on spec, even as real wages for much of China are actually declining.
(We're already in cool story, bra! territory, but 30 years ago my father had a similar experience buying a place for elderly New England relatives to stay in Lawrence, MA--huge spike in value, then prodigious decline, and, sadly, arson, after he'd sold.)