How China’s Golden Age of Real Estate Set the Stage for Today
Unfinished apartment buildings at the construction site of a China Evergrande Group development in Beijing in January 2021.
Photographer: Andrea Verdelli/Bloomberg
Thanks to Evergrande Group and other big developers suffering from massive debt burdens, China’s troubled real estate market has become a global economic concern. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, it wasn’t long ago that there was a golden decade of China property investing.
And by a stroke of pure luck, I was able to get in on the ground floor.
It was 2004, and my wife and two kids had run out of patience trailing me around Asia: we’d lived in six cities in 13 years on various assignments for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. We needed a place to call home, ideally a house—with a garden—near international schools. That’s how we ended up buying in the Beijing suburbs.