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Good home is hard to find

By Earle Gale (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-01 07:53

I've been in Beijing for a year and I've edited lots of stories about the crazy housing market.

In recent weeks, I've gone from reading about it to experiencing it - and I've got to tell you, what I found out there isn't pretty. In fact, it's as ugly as a bullfrog that's shunned by the other bullfrogs for having too many warts.

As far as I can tell - and I admit I'm no housing market expert - there are almost 20 million people in our city. There's 16,800 sq km of land. Thousands of high-rises and apartment buildings. Millions of households. But there are only 12 vacant apartments in my price range in the whole metropolis.

I feel qualified to make that observation after several weeks of painstaking research spent trudging across our city and speaking with dozens of housing agents and after looking in a great many realty storefronts.

Clearly, there is a shortage of vacant apartments on the market right now and a good home is harder to find than a salmon swimming downstream during spawning season.

I began my quest on the Internet.

Somewhat naively, I thought a few keystrokes would be all that was required. I searched in English for "apartments in Beijing" and hooked up with several real estate agents. I could have easily successfully ended my search at that moment - if I had 5,000 or 6,000 yuan a month to spend on a roof over my head.

Tragically, we journalists cling to life in the lower echelons of the food chain.

With a maximum budget of 3,000 a month, my search would continue elsewhere.

My girlfriend, at this point, suggested searching the Internet in Chinese and a world of possibility briefly opened up to us.

The computer coughed up hundreds of homes in our price range and we excitedly began scrolling through them.

After filtering out the ones without photos, the ones with photos of what looked to be prisons, the ones with an impossible commute, the ones that were too expensive and the ones with other obvious blights, we came up with a healthy-looking shortlist and settled down with pen and notepad to troll through them.

We would see a particularly nice bathroom in one, but a horrible kitchen. A horrible kitchen in another, but a particularly nice bathroom. A particularly nice bathroom and kitchen in another, but no living room. Surely, it was just a matter of time before we found the perfect combination.

And then the sky fell in.

We noticed many of the homes looked remarkably similar. Some of the floor plans were almost identical. Very similar furniture. Many people had the same taste in decorating. Then, my girlfriend noticed one kitchen was so similar to one she had seen before that it even had the same magnets on the fridge door.

We scrolled through the photos. They were identical. We suddenly realized that many of the homes we really liked were composites of photos we had seen in other homes. Who knows where the original photos came from. One nice bathroom popped up at least half a dozen times.We wondered what the homes available for rent really looked like and even questioned whether they existed at all.

Frustrated, we gave up our online search and went to talk to the real estate agents directly. During the next few days, we hooked up with dozens.

Some could barely hide their scorn when we told them what we hoped to find and how much we hoped to spend. Many enthusiastically rolled up their sleeves and set about showing us what they could.

Things started out well. On the very first day, we saw a home that was perfect. Small but fairly new. Clean. Well-decorated, in a good area and for about the right price.

We said we would take it.

The agent told us she needed two months of rent for a deposit. One month of rent for her agency fee. And three months of rent in advance. It was a tidy sum and more than I had jangling in my jeans pockets.

We said we would get the money and return the next day to sign the papers.

Within the hour, she called my girlfriend to tell her the place was no longer available.

Someone had scooped it.

Disappointed, we decided that from then on, we would have enough money in our pockets to swoop, hawk-like, on anything that suited us. But it was still a long haul before we found what we were looking for.

The real estate agents kept calling us, but rarely did they take us to see anything that fit the bill.

Usually, we had no idea where we were headed when we met on a prearranged street corner at a prearranged time. Usually, the long walks ended in disappointment. Good apartments were taken. Bad ones were so bad we didn't want to cross the doorstep.

We saw one apartment three times, courtesy of the fact that the three different agents took us there and were all disinclined to tell us where we were going until we got there.

It was a frustrating and exhausting process that seemed to hit rock bottom when we went to look at an apartment that seemed finally to be just what we wanted.

It was on a high floor, had a nice kitchen and bathroom, and was clean, near the subway, and bright and airy.

We were at the point of taking it when we noticed a door we hadn't opened.

"What's in there?" my girlfriend asked.

"Oh that's where my brother lives," said the homeowner.

"Can we look inside?

"No, it's his bedroom."

It turned out that the brother came with the flat and would be sharing the nice bathroom and kitchen and making himself at home in the bright and airy living room.

Thank God we found a nice little walk-up a day or two later and grabbed it. It's no palace, but it's quiet and clean and feels like home.

Looking back on all that walking and looking makes me realize that property, be it rental or for sale, is in short supply. It wouldn't surprise me at all if I get to edit several more stories in the coming months about the skyrocketing house prices in our city.

If any readers have advice on how would-be tenants, especially English-speaking would-be tenants, can find a home in our city, drop me a line and we'll try to pass on the information.