Forget instrumentals and just give me rentals

A music student's decision to play her very own tune has not amused her parents

If Kemi Wang had lived up to her father's expectations, she would now be in China somewhere making a living from music.

Instead, after years of study, the music professor's daughter has cast that future to the wind, much to her parents' chagrin. Her once daily preoccupation with the likes of A sharps and A flats has been replaced by one of just flats - the kind people live in - for Wang is now a real estate agent.

"I didn't want to walk down a road at the starting point of which I can already see the end point," says Wang, 33, sales director of Champs (UK) Property Investment Services, which claims to be one of the biggest overseas real estate investment management companies in the country run by Chinese.

"Instead, I like challenging myself along the way and exploring many things."

The company, which Wang, from Qingdao, Shandong province, set up in 2012, now has 12 employees and not only deals in flat and house rentals but sales as well.

Six years ago Wang was studying the oboe and piano in Manchester, and her father had firm ideas about her future with music.

"He wanted me to return home and follow him in his profession. But I had no desire to set out on the journey he had mapped out for me. I was tired of music at that time, so I decided to stay in the UK and do something completely different."

With that decision made she headed to London, where she started looking for accommodation and stumbled into a new professional calling.

"When I was looking for a flat, I asked an agency if I could be paid if I introduced more customers to it, which is what happened, and that encouraged me to have a try in the market.

"My parents were dead set against my getting into this line of work, but I insisted that I needed to pursue a life of freedom that has challenges."

However, rather than making money doing fairly much what everyone else in the real estate industry does, Wang says, she wanted to try something different.

First, to provide more convenience for house owners, renters and buyers, she says, she did a lot of research in an effort to ensure that services she offered more closely matched customer demand. She then latched onto the idea that a ready-made market for her would be the tens of thousands of Chinese who study in Britain.

Last year almost 460,000 Chinese students went overseas to study, 45,900 more than in 2013, the Chinese Ministry of Education says.

The special touch that Wang adds to her services is renting out properties for periods that coincide with students' semesters.

That means renting out houses and flats in September and developing short-term rentals from people in June for people who come to London for summer camps.

"In that case, I make full use of apartments and houses that the owners rent out to me. I pay them six-months' rent up front, reducing their risk and giving myself more sources for property."

The idea is to satisfy renters' demands and ensure for the owners that utilities bills are paid on time.

Wang says that in addition to the many Chinese students who provide an ideal rental market, more Chinese are buying property in Britain.

In 2011 Chinese people accounted for 2 percent of house purchases in London and by last year that had shot up to 10 percent, the Daily Telegraph has reported. Eighty percent of about 10,000 houses or flats in central London were sold by foreigners in 2012, it said."

"More and more Chinese parents are coming to the UK to buy houses," Wang says. "Some are aimed at providing a better environment for children studying overseas, while some are investments. After all, here it costs more to rent than to buy."

In two of four deals Wang's company did last month, houses were sold to Chinese parents buying on behalf of their children.

To ensure such houses can be rented out, Wang says she has to work six days a week, and there is often a lot of anxiety when rental properties remain vacant.

Her husband, a civil engineer, eases the pressure on her, she says, by "helping me a lot in selecting a house and showing me how to run the company".

As for the piano and the oboe, she still plays them at home occasionally as relaxation, "but I prefer to set challenges for myself in the real estate industry, just as climbers like exploring different mountains".

caoyin@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 05/08/2015 page29)