A woman in Beijing who lived in China's capital city all her life managed buy six homes in Houston, Texas after selling her two-bedroom apartment in Beijing's Chaoyang district for three million RMB ($483,300).
The Beijinger, surnamed Li, rented out all six apartments in Houston for a bit more than $400 per month. She still lives in her original apartment in Beijing, but this time on rent. The total rental income she collected from the apartments in US minus the amount she pays for her Beijing apartment comes to 10,000 RMB per month, which means that Li can simply earn more than 100,000 RMB annually from this housing trick.
According to a report by the US-based National Association of Realtors (NAR), Li is among many Chinese taking advantage of the US property market. Buyers from the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan purchased about a quarter of the international sales of US properties, as China Daily reports.
For the period April 2013 through March 2014, the estimated investment from the Chinese totaled $22 billion, with 76 percent of purchases in cash, said the report.
As of June, 2014, prices of newly-built residential housings averaged 33,269 yuan per sq meter in Beijing, and that of second-hand homes came to an average of 38,821 yuan, according to statistics combined by Soufun.com, a real estate website.
Meanwhile, the average prices for international sales of US properties came to $396,180 from April 2013 to March 2014, and the mean purchase prices paid by Chinese buyers were $590,826, according to the NAR report.