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‘Map’ of down payment woes in China
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AN average wage earner has to save for 13 years just to raise the down payment for a small flat in Beijing — if he or she can live on thin air.
The Chinese capital is one of nine places that are marked as “red zones” in an unofficial map indicating how much home buyers suffer in different parts of the country.
In the red zones, home buyers have to scrape together every single cent they earn for at least nine years — without spending anything even on food — to cover the down payment for a home no bigger than 80 square meters.
The down payment makes up an average 30 percent of the home price.
According to this “map,” home buyers in Beijing are the third most miserable groups after those in Hong Kong and Macau, where ordinary wage earners have to save 19 and 14 years respectively for the down payment.
Other Chinese cities that appear red on the map are Xiamen, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Taipei.
It is unclear who drew the “map of Chinese home buyers’ agonies.” But a note at the bottom of the map says the different degrees of agony were calculated on the basis of average income levels released by the National Bureau of Statistics, and average home prices collected from the different cities.
The calculations have also sparked complaints from web users, who claim their incomes are below the average level, while the actual home prices are even higher than what the map suggests.
“The average income level on the map is 7,100 yuan (US$1,123) a month in Beijing, but I make only 5,000 yuan,” said a netizen with the screen name “A-ling” on Weibo.com, a microblogging site.
The map indicates Beijing’s average home price is 47,000 yuan per square meter, but apartments in downtown areas, particularly near the city’s top schools, can sell for three or four times as much.
Fifteen cities appear green on the map, including Tianjin, Harbin, Qingdao, Wuhan, Kunming, Haikou and Guangzhou. Home buyers there need to save from five to eight years for the down payment.
An average wage earner in less developed cities, including Urumqi, Xining, Xi’an as well as landlocked cities of Taiyuan, Changsha, Shenyang and Chongqing needs to save for less than four years to buy a home. These cities are printed blue on the map.
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