[tryonqc]

You are correct. China only tax when you sell / buy property. The porperty tax "reform" should be in place by the end of 2019 though.

I think house prices in china can't really be compared with other country for lots of reasons, eg: they don't own their homes (70y lease), very low interest on loans (1-2%), real estate is seen as a very good investment in china, etc.:)

[seanmcdirmid]

The 70 year leases are probably going to be renewed very cheaply/easily as happened in Wenzhou when the middle class made a huge fuss over the early (shorter term) leases ending. The central government had to step in and make the local government renew them for basically nothing.

Also, China lacks very good investments (the stock market is still a joke), so real estate is seen as the only viable option to beat inflation. So even in hot markets like Beijing and Shanghai, lots of nice apartment buildings will have empty units, which are just being held as an asset and are not even renovated to be rented out.

China is not really that unique from other countries, it’s real estate market is quite expected considering the factors that created it.

[baybal2]

Indeed, feel to be 1-to-1 parallel to property bubble in 200x Russia, except scaled to the size of China: Russian law effectively prevents people who can't pay for a personal financial lawyer to invest abroad, and for the short period of time the fun lasted people were investing in even crazier vanities than Chinese do now.

I believe that "you can't invest abroad unless you have money for a legal counsel" applies to a lot of countries.

Adding to you point on property taxes: Russian provinces with regional property taxes only saw, i think, 1/10th of the bubble in comparison to the rest of the country. At the time when an average private individual could buy 5 flats in 3 years in hopes of bubble growing faster than than interest on his loan, it will be pretty expensive to pay even 0.75% property tax, as it can easily be bigger than guy's annual income.