Name: China’s Property Crisis: Inside a Ghost Town of Abandoned Mansions
Uploaded: 2024-02-22T05:01:00Z
Duration: 5 min 14 s
Description: China’s property crisis is expected to worsen as new home sales plummet and indebted developers struggle to find funds to complete projects. WSJ’s Jonathan Cheng traveled to an abandoned “ghost town” to see the challenge China’s real-estate slump poses for the government. Photo: Antoine Morel for The Wall Street Journal

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China’s property crisis is expected to worsen as new home sales plummet and indebted developers struggle to find funds to complete projects. WSJ’s Jonathan Cheng traveled to an abandoned “ghost town” to see the challenge China’s real-estate slump poses for the government. Photo: Antoine Morel for The Wall Street Journal

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China’s Property Crisis: Inside a Ghost Town of Abandoned Mansions

The developers here designed this home in the style of a grand European mansion, but this is all it is right now. It's the shell of a half completed, empty house, and this house is just one of more than a hundred on this site here. And this particular compound is one of many, just like it all across China. Abandoned, empty, a headache for China's policymakers. We're here in Shenyang City, 400 miles northeast of Beijing. It's in second tier cities like Shenyang that China's real estate woes are perhaps the most visible. In some cases, you even have entire compounds of villas that have been built but will probably never get finished. One example is estate guest mansions, built by Greenland Group, one of the more than 50 housing developers that have defaulted on their debts in recent years. What lies here now is a skeleton of a housing project that began construction in 2010, but came to a halt a few years later. Its gardens have been taken over by farmers herding goats into makeshift pens. The abandoned homes are a testament to a property crisis, long in the making. Yeah, this is it. Greenland Group says it invested $230 million in this site alone. So here we are. This is building called Grandeur Place and it feels like a big post-apocalyptic opera house in Paris or something. But as you can see, this is the showroom where they used to bring interested customers and show them what the grounds were gonna look like, what their mansions were gonna look like. But as you can see now, it's not what it used to be. You got a chandelier up above with some fire extinguishers that someone somehow got up there. There's a French flag lying in tatters on the floor. I think that's part of their French style sales pitch. A decades long real estate boom prompted developers to take on a lot of debt to build homes ahead of demand. Plans for this site included a golf course, a convention center and a hotel. Greenland sold less than 5% of the homes here, before construction stopped. I think we may be in this building here. Either way, this is the vision that Greenland Group, the developer of this project originally had in mind. The developer hasn't given an official explanation for why it stopped work here, but it doesn't look like they're about to restart anytime soon. Greenland pre-sold units here before they were finished, something replicated all across China. There are an estimated 20 million units of pre-sold, but incomplete homes across the country. The huge volume of undelivered apartments has left many Chinese households in limbo. Here we are on the fourth story of a single family unit that looks like it was mostly completed, and you've got all sorts of different signs of life, but I don't think anyone's been here for quite a long time. Last July, Greenland defaulted on over $400 million worth of international bonds. Despite counting the Shanghai Government as a major shareholder, Greenland hasn't been spared from the turmoil in China's property market. Beijing tried to deflate China's housing bubble by imposing strict debt and cash flow targets on developers. Property giants crumbled, setting off a chain of developer defaults. This is just another of the residential property developments in Shenyang that have frozen in their tracks. This one behind me, it was started by China Evergrande Group, the country's largest residential property developer and one that was ordered to liquidate in January. China Evergrande's rapid expansion was really emblematic of how quickly and how important the real estate market became for China's broader economy. Evergrande has left 800,000 pre-sold homes, across China unfinished with a little prospect of them being completed. Evergrande collapsed, triggered protests by homeowners, furious that units they had started paying mortgages for, weren't being finished and all signs indicate things will only get worse. Sales of newly built homes fell 6% in 2023, returning to levels unseen since 2016 and sales are expected to fall further in 2024 and 2025. Evergrande and Greenland Group did not respond to a request for comment on the status of the unfinished homes. For many people in China, buying property was long seen as one of the most reliable ways to invest your money. But seeing properties like this spread all over the country has made people think twice. Now, many look upon real estate as one of the least reliable investments, and that poses an enormous challenge to China's Government.