Young urban professionals get access to affordable housing

Flexible, affordable, and complete with community spaces for social networking, rented housing projects for young professionals are now common across China.

They are gradually taking away market share from the conventional rental market consisting of individual landlords and tenants.

When 25-year-old Zhang Haiyun first glanced at her new apartment, a 45-square-meter en suite in central Shanghai's Jing'an district, she could not believe that the rent for this well-decorated residence was just 2,000 yuan ($289) per month, only half of her previous rental of a simple room in an old building on the outskirts of the city.