>>512084605So in Toronto, Canada, it is the norm for developers to not even begin building condos till enough units have been sold pre-construction, in theory, it should be people buying their future home, but it's a bunch of investers intending to rent it out or resell it, often a pre construction condo unit would be flipped multiple times even before it's actually built, cause real estate always goes up right? In Canada this has resulted in a lot of badly constructed condos since the buyer don't care what the finish product is going t be like, he's not going to live there, he'll resell it, and the next guy is planning to resell it before whatever issues the finish product have come up, that's why there are condos with crazy condo fees or water leaks at the window wall within 9 years.
In China of course it's even worse, as China has worse corruption AND lack of different investment opportunities, so it's just real estate where you can park your wealth, as the bank can just lose it too, but if you keep all your wealth in cash it could be stolen or burnt. People are already used to leaving their hometown to work in the major cities with manufacturing -- sometimes they leave their kids with their elderly parents, so it's not so strange to have a future home in another city, someday when they saved up enough to move there, or when the city where their property is has jobs, the problem is that the ghost cities stay ghost cities because they are in the middle of nowhere where land is cheaper, and since the buyers aren't living there who is going to check if the final product is fit to live in? Or it starts out livable but because nobody is there maintaining it, it falls apart. Maybe, the developer did plan to have a finish product the buyer can live in, but they ran out of money. So now we got condo 'owners' who actually own nothing, except a promise to pay out the mortgage they took for the nothing.