Exclusive | China property: how the world’s biggest housing market emerged
- Home ownership is China’s ultimate symbol of success, the mark of adulthood, readiness for a family, and ownership of one’s financial destiny
- Chinese citizens devote as much as 74 per cent of their savings toward housing, compared with 35 per cent in the US, according to research
Two decades ago, a scholar returned to China with a gift from his studies in America – the dream that an ordinary Chinese family can own a home.
It was the quintessential American dream. But, in the hands of Meng Xiaosu, who would go on to be known as China’s “Godfather of Real Estate,” it would quickly become the quintessential Chinese dream.
“A friend of mine in the United States told me about their dream – one home, one car,” Meng recalled in an interview with the South China Morning Post. “I believed that owning a car was out of reach at the time in China. But China could have the same home ownership dream.”
That was quite an aspiration for the time. The wounds of China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) were still raw, the communist nation’s dalliance with capitalism since 1978 was still in its teens, and the very idea of property ownership was not even protected by law.
But Meng was no ordinary visiting scholar. He was already the president of China’s first real estate firm – the China National Real Estate Development Group (CNRED). He also had been tapped by the Chinese government to map out a plan to develop property in the country.
Due in no small part to Meng and innovative thinkers like him, China is now the world’s biggest housing market, with US$1.7 trillion of new home sales last year, seven times the total transactions in the US, according to Stansberry Churchouse Research.
