[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.