TO get a Shanghai car plate, Jerry Jiang has been bidding for nearly a year. He has summoned the services of his entire family, including his parents and wife, and gotten suggestions and help from friends and colleagues.

And it’s not even for himself. The quest comes from his boss, who wants to switch his non-Shanghai car plate to a local one.

Jiang has tried all methods and different places to bid on the monthly auction, hoping for a faster Internet speed and thus a better chance.

“It is just so difficult, almost impossible,” the 32-year-old bank clerk tells Shanghai Daily. “I would never have gone through all these troubles if it were for myself. I only hope I can get this over quickly.”

In August, more than 120,000 people in the city battled it out online for 7,400 plates at the monthly auction, with an average price of 73,785 yuan (US$12,020). The success rate of getting a plate was about 6 percent.

That’s “not much better than lottery or gamble,” according to a man surnamed Chen, a scalper who makes money out of charging a service fee for bidding on car plates or trading second-hand plates.

“We have our tricks,” Chen says. “If you do it yourself, it is just like a gamble. We are veterans and we focus on finding the best way.”

He admits his success rate has also dropped dramatically — from almost 100 percent to less than 20 percent, since a new online auction system launched in April.

The new scheme was designed to limit the price of plates that had once gone beyond 100,000 yuan amid rocketing demand. Netizens called it “the most expensive iron — more pricey than gold per gram.”

Shanghai was the first city in the country to issue car plates back in the 1920s, when the city authority created the policy according to international conventions at the time. After 1949, vehicles were allocated as production materials and were not allowed to be sold to private owners.

The turning point came in 1986, when car plate 0001 appeared in Shanghai. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the city opened a stock exchange and many people started private businesses, more people could afford to start buying cars.

“A private car of any kind was a symbol of social status back then, implying the person is a businessman, or is very wealthy or has come back from overseas,” says Jason Cao, an investor who got his first car and car plate in the early 1990s.

Too expensive for ordinary people

“It was sold in a set, but I think the plate was more than 100,000 yuan back then, which was understandable at the time because it was sort of like a privilege for just wealthy people. Like if you buy an airplane, you won’t really complain how expensive it is.”

He says, “It makes less sense today as cars have become a popularized transportation, as it should be, and plates are still so expensive, out of reach for ordinary people.”

The car plate auction earned the relevant departments nearly 9 billion yuan last year. The latest municipal announcements showed the money had been mostly spent to support public transportation, which includes purchase of new buses, subsidies for senior citizens to ride public buses free, to open new routes that go to remote areas late at night, among many other measures.

In the past, the highest bidder was assured to win a plate.

“Just put 100,000 yuan there, and it was almost 100 percent,” Chen says. He advised his clients who cared more about getting a plate than budget to do it that way.

Not true anymore. With the new system, buyers are limited to adding just 300 yuan to a high bid, with only three chances to add. Success depends more on whether bidders can get themselves squeezed into the platform at the last second.

“It is luck and Internet speed,” says Jiang, now a veteran at bidding for car plates. “And of course, you need to have a correct estimate of the expected price, but that’s not even that important now, since the price has been pretty much the same.”

Scalper Chen asks for 15,000 yuan as service fee and says he gets 20 to 30 requests a month. Chen also sells second-hand plates, charging about 130,000 yuan, He once sold a plate for 142,000, almost doubling the original purchasing price of slightly over 70,000 yuan.

“The number of car plates issued every month is not much different from that before the new policy launched,” Chen says, “but there are more people bidding for it, as some see the opportunity to make money. That makes it even more difficult, and the difficulty drives the price in the second-hand market and motivates more people to join the bidding. It is a bad circle, even for us, because it’s much harder.”

He has been rushing the last few months to make his big money, as the municipal government has announced it will regulate the second-hand car plate market by requiring the used plates to be included in the auction platform by end of this year.

Details are to be released, and car plate scalpers like Chen are worried about future business. The announcement has also met objections from other people.

“I need to wait for more details, but does that mean my father will need to bid for my car plate if I want to transfer it to him?” says a businessman surnamed Cao.

Before the new system was implemented, 40,000 to 50,000 people bid for the new car plates every month, but the number has risen dramatically in the last few months to more than 120,000 people in August.

Shanghai is not the only place to confront the challenges of a rapid increase in the number of vehicles. The National Bureau of Statistics showed that the number of privately owned cars may have exceeded 90 million by end of 2012, up more than 18 percent from the previous year. Industrial experts have estimated the number to be around 130 million by end of 2013. In the early 1990s, it was less than 1 million.

In big cities like Shanghai and Beijing, one in every six or seven individuals owns a car, resulting in incredible traffic jams and contributing to serious air pollution.

Confronting such difficulties, many cities and provinces have been launching policies to control the number of car plates. Most followed the lottery model in Beijing. Shanghai is the only city to take an auction model. There are pros and cons for both.

“I don’t think I will ever get a car plate through the normal method,” laments Huang Ci, a 30-year-old headhunter based in Beijing. “Maybe my son will already be in college when we finally have a Beijing car plate.”

He is currently driving with a car plate from Hebei Province, which means he needs to renew his permission to enter Beijing every year, among other restrictions for non-Beijing car plates.

“My ancestors going back a dozen generations were all Beijing natives, but I need permission to enter Beijing!” he says.

Data shows that more than 5 million cars are registered in Beijing. In June, more than 2.7 million people entered Beijing’s lottery for about 20,000 plates, which means less than 1 percent got one. The numbers translate into an average wait time of more than 10 years, and that’s assuming no increase in demand over that time.