Woman sells Beijing house, buys six properties in US

For Li, a Beijinger who has grown up and lived in China's capital city all her life, the city's skyrocketing housing prices turned out to be a windfall.

Last year, she sold her only living space in the city, an old two-bedroom apartment in Shuangjing, Chaoyang district, for 3 million yuan ($483,300), which in turn made it possible for her to buy six houses in Houston, Texas in the US.

Li rents out each of her properties in Houston for more than $400 per month, and still lives in her original apartment in Beijing, but this time on rent.

Her rental income collected in the US minus the amount she pays for her apartment in Beijing comes to 10,000 yuan per month, meaning that Li's annual earnings from her "housing trick" will be more than 100,000 yuan.

Of course, Li is not the only Chinese enthusiastic about the US property market.

Buyers from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan purchased about a quarter of international sales of US properties, according to a report by the US-based National Association of Realtors (NAR).

For the period April 2013 through March 2014, the estimated investment from the Chinese totaled $22 billion, with 76 percent of purchases in cash, said the report.

As of June, 2014, prices of newly-built residential housings averaged 33,269 yuan per sq meter in Beijing, and that of second-hand homes came to an average of 38,821 yuan, according to statistics combined by Soufun.com, a real estate website.

Meanwhile, the average prices for international sales of US properties came to $396,180 from April 2013 to March 2014, and the mean purchase prices paid by Chinese buyers were $590,826, according to the NAR report.

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