More young Chinese are buying apartments right after graduating from university. Photo: IC.

It was a Saturday afternoon in May, and Li Yang, a 27-year-old graduate student at Shenyang Pharmaceutical University, was trailing his real estate agent from building to building in Beijing's Xicheng district, not far from his internship at a medical company. This wasn't any old house-hunting mission - he was looking to buy. After seeing scores of places, he finally settled on a 40-square-meter loft located on the West Third Ring, which cost 950,000 yuan ($ 144,115). He and the agent decided that they would meet with the landlord the following week to sign the papers.

"I think it's a good choice," Li later said. "Owning an apartment in the city will make my life more stable here, and I'll be able to focus more energy on my career." 

Li isn't alone in what some might consider precocious efforts to settle down.

"As far as I know, many of my classmates and friends who have also just graduated from university are also planning to buy an apartment soon," he said.

According to a 2010 report by Guangda Bank, the average age of first-time home buyers in Beijing is 27, the youngest around the world.

It's a phenomenon that's become increasingly common in large urban centers across China.

According to a survey conducted by China Youth Daily's social research center in 2013, 84.1 percent of 19,869 respondents said that they know people who are planning to buy apartments right after graduation. Among those surveyed, 37.3 percent live in first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

Deputy Director at the China Land Science Society Dong Liming, who studies the real estate market, said that he has also noticed this trend in recent years. As real estate prices continue to inflate, many young graduates and their parents are rushing to buy apartments, fearing that if they wait, they won't be able to afford them in the future.

Rising rents and the unstable renting market are also prompting more young graduates to buy rather than rent apartments.

The drive to settle down

For many young people moving to new cities, the desire for stability is a major reason for buying a house shortly after graduation.

Kathe Zhang, 25, who works at an energy company in Beijing, bought an apartment almost as soon as she graduated from university in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.

Before graduating, Zhang spent seven months doing an internship at a French company in Beijing, where she rented a small room in a rundown apartment building near Liangmaqiao. Though the apartment was originally a three-bedroom, partitions had been installed to house more residents, and Zhang ended up living with four couples. Though Zhang had her own space, it was only around 13 square meters, and cost 1,200 yuan a month, eating up the majority of her 2,000 yuan monthly salary.

"It didn't even have an outside-facing window," Zhang recalled. "Every day, I'd have to go downstairs to see what the weather was and figure out what to wear."

At night, the apartment erupted into cacophony, as the noise from her eight roommates leaked through the thin walls. Every evening she could hear her flatmates watching TV, playing guitar and having couples' quarrels. Often, she wasn't able to fall asleep until the early hours of the morning because of all the noise.

What was even more distressing was that the landlord had decided to sell the apartment, but they didn't know when, which meant that the specter of movng hung over Zhang's head at all times.

"During that time, I wanted to have a stable home so much. I even told my parents that I didn't want to work in Beijing anymore, because I had no sense of belonging," Zhang said. "But my parents really wanted me to stay in Beijing, because, as people from a small third-tier city, they believe Beijing has all the opportunities and that I could actually make something of myself and live my dream life here. I guess that was when they started planning to buy me an apartment."

It wasn't long before they got word of a new building in Daxing district, where apartments were being sold for around 10,000 yuan per square meter, a relatively reasonable price by Beijing standards. Zhang's parents made the down payment on an apartment in the complex, and agreed to pay the mortgage until Zhang could afford it herself.

"I am not exactly proud of that," Zhang said. "But there is no way I could have afforded that apartment myself."

The purchase served its intended purpose - Zhang is starting to feel at home. "Weirdly, ever since I got that apartment, even though it's in the suburbs and the commute between home and work is painful, I finally feel that I belong to the city, and I can make long-term plans for myself," she said.

Compared with women, men receive greater social pressure to buy property in order to improve their marriage prospects.

A 2013 survey of 15,000 singles by Information Times revealed that two-thirds of female respondents said that they would not considering marrying a guy without an apartment.

 That was one motivation for Li, who said that he became determined to buy his own house - even though it would mean his family borrowing money - after experiencing rejection on several dates for not owning an apartment. "I am not exactly handsome or have a really good job, and I haven't had much luck with dating. I figured if I bought an apartment, it could add to my value in the dating market," he said.

A good investment?

In addition to the urge to settle down, both Zhang and Li cited anxiety over ever-rising housing prices as a motivation for buying an apartment.

"In 2007, my mother's friends suggested that she buy me an apartment, which at that time cost only 7,000 yuan per square meter, but by the time I graduated, the price had risen to over 20,000 yuan," Zhang said. "People around us were predicting that the price would continue to rise, so we realized that buying an apartment in a big city like Beijing was a good investment opportunity."

According to a sohu.com report released this month, average housing prices in Beijing reached 44,167 yuan per square meter this April, an increase of 23.34 percent over the same period last year.

Though wages also increased around 23 percent, from 7,086 yuan to 8,717 yuan per month, according thea Beijing Evening News report in June 2016, the rise in housing prices represents an insurmountable amount of debt for many.

And it's never early to buy a house of your own and wait for its price to go up.

Yet these economics are paying off for those who've already bought homes in the city, like Zhang, who says that three years after purchasing her apartment, its price has risen to 15,000 yuan per square meter.

"I also rent out the apartment, and the rent happens to cover the monthly mortgage. I guess you could say I made the right choice," Zhang said.

Young people are rushing to buy houses because of skyrocketing prices and an unstable renting market, as well as a desire for security. Photo: IC.

A worldwide phenomenon

According to Dong, modern social and economic circumstances have conspired to create a situation in which parents invest huge sums of money in buying their children homes. In addition to the rising cost of real estate in many first-tier cities, he pointed out that the one-child policy has led many parents to coddle their only children, and devote the whole family's resources to setting them up.

However, this is not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon; in recent years, more and more young people in Western countries have also been turning to their parents for help buying their first property.

According to a report by The Telegraph in January 2015, two-thirds of first time buyers in the UK currently say they cannot afford to buy a house without help from their parents, double the figure five years ago, based on data from the National Housing Federation.

Parents in the UK pay an average of 13,281 pounds ($ 18,732) to help fund their children's first step onto the property ladder, the article said, quoting a Lloyds Bank saving report.

According to a New York Times report in June 2011, this trend has also been appearing in the US, where real estate brokers said they had been seeing more parents shopping for apartments for their grown children in recent years.

Dong commented that, due to the economic crisis, fewer young people in the US and Europe have been able to find jobs, making it next to impossible for many of them to buy their own homes  independently. In recent years, meanwhile, many Western governments have launched policies to lower mortgage rates in order to encourage more people to buy property, meaning, Dong speculated, that parents in these countries might see it as a good investment opportunity.

"Economic conditions are pushing young adults to rely more on their parents for financial help. But overall, young people from Western countries are still more independent than their peers in China," Dong said.


Newspaper headline: The hunt for a home