What This $100B Ghost City Reveals About China’s Property Crisis | WSJ
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Published 2023-09-11
The real estate project in southern Malaysia was planned to house around 700,000 people, but only 9,000 people live there with most units left empty. So why are Chinese real estate companies like the Evergrande Group and Sunac falling into financial distress?
WSJ explains why China’s real estate developers are in the red.
0:00 Forest City
0:48 China’s real estate market
2:56 What’s next?
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All Comments (21)
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I’m from Malaysia and I think properties are not meant to be speculated. It’s sad and ironic that we are living in this world yet may be priced out of having roof over our heads. There’s plenty of stuffs to speculate but properties should not be one of them.
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Being a Florida native, there is nothing that makes me happier than seeing real estate developers lose their pants for trying to rapidly urbanize an area for the sake of speculation.
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Evergrande eventually defaulted so I don't see how Country Garden could escape the same fate considering the housing market even gets worse everyday.
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Man it's almost as if we should be building to provide living for people and NOT using real estate for speculative investment. Crazy that, huh.
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The good side is that residential properties are transforming from investment to living-in properties because of the price drops.
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they destroyed the mangroves to build this monstrosity, our views at Sg Buloh destroyed. Glad the properties gone down the way of the dogs.
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Oh well, in a few years it will truly live up to its name as a 'Forest' City.
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some places are experiencing housing shortage while others are over-building
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I am staying near this ghost town in Johor Malaysia. It is dilapidated with many Chinese surveillance technologies.... Scary as well.
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Privately owned developers among the top 100 were nearly all wiped out, while nearly 90% of the party-owned developers stayed. That’s the scary thing.
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Country Garden is known for its very agressive expansion strategy, not for being prudent.
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there are literally hundreds of these cities in China
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What happens when you get insane levels of corruption, extremely low quality construction selling for 45x the average salary, buildings that literally fall apart, and disaster economy
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It's hard to tell how much of the greenery on the buildings in Forest City is intended to be there. For now, it's just a great set for a post apocalyptic movie. Hardly any need for editing.
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When Housing is not build for real demand, but just for investment, you know the system is f..ed up.
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I went there a few months ago on my way to JB from Singapore, we didn't see more than 100 people there (that included the staff maintaining the gardens)
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For those of us who are over age 25, we got to see the modern Chinas golden age and we are now witnessing its end. Idk why people watch reality tv shows - this is far more compelling
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Their big mistake was transport links; they should have built a quay with regular fast ferries running to and from super-expensive Singapore, as well as rail links and bus routes to the rest of Malaysia. Forest City is not only in the middle of nowhere, it's also incredibly difficult to reach without a car.
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The property bubble was there from the start, it was a matter of when it would burst. How can anyone not notice it when you have a huge proportion of completed residences go unoccuppied? The owners/speculators had to learn their lesson one way or another, unfortunately the painful way!
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If such insane property developers are in immense trouble, so are many banks across China? Real estate trouble usually equals banking trouble.
