Chinese Housing Bubble...

Read this interesting post on the Chinese housing market from Econbrowser.  A guest at a dinner party I attended a couple of weeks back who manages a luxury hotel in Shanghai had an interesting anecdote about the housing market in China at the moment.  His story went something like this...

"There are a lot of recently completed but mostly empty luxury high-rise apartments in Shanghai and other major Chinese cities.  The reason that they are mostly empty is not because people aren't buying them, but because people are buying them on spec and then re-selling them.  Individuals are borrowing the money, buying these apartments and them re-selling them after 3-4 months without ever living in them.  It is the pace of the turnover that I found to be astounding: 3-4 months!  It certainly says something about the amount of liquidity that must be flowing through the Chinese economy (despite the Chinese gov'ts apparent recent attempts to rein in lending)."