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Property marauders!
By Zhou Yan (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-30 15:50 When they first began foraging from city to city a decade ago, the so-called "property marauders" from Wenzhou in southeastern Zhejiang province struck terror in the hearts of aspiring homeowners from Shanghai to Chongqing and nearly every major secondary town in between.
 At the time there was no record to track the origin of the Wenzhou funds and their movements. But the impact of the often sudden and unannounced influx of these investment funds in any particular targeted city was made startlingly clear by sharp jumps in residential property prices. For that reason, local property developers, real estate agents and speculators welcomed the Wenzhou investor groups who operated through agents and from behind indecipherable corporate identities. Some of them may well have collaborated with the Wenzhou group to push up prices for mutual benefit. In the process, the less well-informed prospective homebuyers were often caught by surprise. By the time they got wind of the influx, prices of their dream homes had already risen beyond their reach. Nobody had any idea of how big the funds were. But they were certainly big enough to destabilize a market as large and sophisticated as Shanghai, which was among the first cities targeted by the Wenzhou high-rollers. Crusade On August 18, 2001, a group of 110 potential investors from Wenzhou arrived by train in Shanghai. Within a few weeks of their arrival, they bought a total of 51 high-class apartments in the choicest districts in the city. Their foray had apparently caught the fancy of many other Wenzhou manufacturers, enriched by years of booming export trade. Huang Zhongping was 39 and one of them when he pumped 640,000 yuan into Zhong Yuan Liang Wan City in 2002 in the Putuo District of Shanghai, for an over-140 sq m apartment. "I bought the house for my child," the owner of a small shoe- manufacturing factory says. He needed a Shanghai residency permit in order to send his daughter to a Shanghai school and owning a home was one way to get one. "I was determined to send my daughter to live and study in this metropolitan city. And a house means a Shanghai 'passport'. That's why I bought it. Very simple!" Huang recalls. But the benefits he reaped from the house were not only his child's new-found Shanghainese status, but more fruitfully, a big fortune. "The property market went crazy after that. When I sold the house for 1.68 million yuan in 2006, my earnings were more than doubled," Huang says. But before that, using his business acumen, Huang also sniffed out the looming real estate investment opportunities elsewhere. (For more biz stories, please visit Industries)
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