There is a property listing taped to the bus shelter on my road. It was there before I arrived. It is A4, in a plastic sleeve, and the sun has taken most of the colour out of it: a photograph of a sitting room with a sofa nobody has ever sat on, then four lines — location, floor area, price, phone number — and the name of an agency at the bottom in red. When the wind gets under the plastic it flaps. The tape has gone brittle and yellow. Somebody changes the listing every few months. Nobody takes the shelter down.
Every bus shelter out here has one. So does the side of the rubbish bins, and the boards at the gate of every compound. Walk half an hour along the coast road and you will pass more advertisements for flats than for anything else — for vegetables, for a dentist, for a restaurant. This is a place with around two hundred residential compounds and, for ten months of the year, almost nobody inside them. So the standing inventory of things for sale is enormous, and the cheapest way to advertise a flat is to tape a sheet of paper to street furniture and wait.
People write to me about this. Not about the sea, mostly. About the flats. Can I buy one? Is it a good idea? Which compound? Which floor? I get asked so often that I have a standard answer, and the standard answer begins with a confession: I have never bought a flat here. I have rented for four years and I have no intention of buying. What follows is therefore not impartial. It is the arithmetic of a man who chose the other thing, laid out as plainly as I can manage, so that you can run your own numbers on it.
The price of a flat here
Second-hand flats in Rushan Silver Beach now average around 2,000 yuan per square metre (about $280). That is the average, and the average is falling. Below it, a great many properties sit at 1,000 yuan a square metre (about $140) or less. A fifty-square-metre two-room flat goes for roughly 100,000 yuan (about $13,900). A hundred square metres goes for around 200,000 (about $27,800). Somewhere around a hundred and fifty thousand (about $20,800) you can have a second-hand flat that is properly fitted out — decent kitchen, working bathroom, furniture that came from a shop rather than from somebody’s grandmother.
Even the good stock is cheap by any standard. A flat with a lift, a good floor, a decent position, reasonably modern decoration — a flat like that very rarely exceeds 3,000 yuan a square metre (about $420). There is almost no price bracket in which this place is expensive.
New build is the exception, and it is a strange one. New flats here run 7,000 to 8,000 yuan a square metre, sometimes 9,000 (about $970 to $1,250). That is three or four times the cost of a second-hand flat a few streets away. I have never understood who buys them, and I suspect the answer is that almost nobody does, which is why the sales offices stay lit up in the evening with a table of agents and a table of prospects and nothing much happening between them.
The advertisements on the bus shelters run from 100,000 to 300,000 yuan (about $13,900 to $41,700), most of them in the low hundreds of thousands, with the villas higher. What they are selling, essentially, is a building that was thrown up in a hurry for people who never came.
Here is the structural fact underneath all of it: the price is falling because the supply is vast and the queue of buyers is short. There are more flats here than there are people who want flats here, and there will be for the rest of my life. Nothing about that is going to reverse. So this is not an investment, and it is not a hedge, and it is not a way to park money. It is only ever a place to live, and only worth buying if you actually intend to live in it for a long time.
Why the cheap ones are cheap
When a whole town’s housing stock is cheap, people hear one number and imagine one thing. In fact there is a wide band of prices here, and the band is wide because of defects. The cheap flats are cheap for reasons, and the reasons are specific.
Position. Silver Beach is not a town; it is a strip. It runs more than twenty kilometres along the coast, east to west, and the compounds are strung out along it. The ones at the far ends are in the middle of nothing — no shop, no bus worth waiting for, no neighbours. From some of them it is a half-hour electric-bike ride to buy vegetables. Those are the ones that go for almost nothing.
Floor, in the walk-ups. A large share of the older stock is six or seven storeys with no lift. On the first, second and third floors the price holds up, because older buyers can manage three flights and there are more of them than you would think. An eighty-square-metre flat on a low floor can still want 200,000 yuan (about $27,800). Go up and the price collapses. On the sixth or seventh floor the same eighty square metres might go for fifty or sixty thousand (about $6,900 to $8,300). The top floor is the worst of it: in summer it leaks, in winter the wind comes through it, and I have seen those flats advertised at just over a thousand yuan a square metre.
Ground floor. Ground-floor flats look like a bargain — a bit of garden, no stairs, easy for anyone whose knees are going. They are also, nearly always, damp. Some come with a basement, some do not, and it makes less difference than you would hope. In a wet season the walls sweat. When there is a building in front of yours and the sun sits low in winter, the flat may not see direct sunlight for months. Bugs and mosquitoes come with the soil. Those flats are cheap for a reason you will feel on your skin.
Orientation. A flat facing due north, or one boxed in behind a taller block, gets no sun at all. On the coast, a flat with no sun is a cold store. The sea wind carries the damp into everything, and without sun to dry it out the whole place stays cold in a way that no amount of heating quite fixes. I would not take one at any price.
Heating. This one matters more here than anywhere I have lived. Most of these compounds have no central heating, and never have. A flat in a compound with it is both more desirable and more expensive; a flat without it is much cheaper. And I would say this as loudly as I can to anyone being shown round by an agent: do not accept “this compound will have heating soon.” Go and check the government’s own published schedule. I have heard that promise about compounds here for years, and some of those promises are a decade old and no closer to being true. An agent’s “soon” is not a date.
Decoration. A great deal of the stock was last decorated fifteen or twenty years ago and has not been touched since. The paint is yellow and coming off in sheets. The floors are those old red ceramic tiles. The furniture is whatever the owner had finished with somewhere else. The kitchen has a layer of grease that predates my arrival. Buy one of those and the cost of ripping it all out may exceed what you paid for the flat. Cheap goods are not good goods; that rule holds in housing as everywhere else.
What the price does not include
The number on the bus shelter is the smallest number in the whole transaction, and this is the part people skip.
Most of this housing is fifteen to twenty years old, and much of it has stood empty for five, ten, twenty of those years. Even where the owner did some work, it was the cheapest fit-out the developer would sign off on. It is not a flat you can move into. It is a flat you have to rebuild.
So you buy at 150,000 yuan (about $20,800), and then: the water and electrical lines are re-run, because the old ones are not safe and not adequate. The walls and floors are stripped and redone. The furniture and appliances are all replaced, because the old ones are finished. Add that up and the fifteen-thousand-yuan flat turns into fifteen thousand more of work, and the whole thing lands somewhere around 200,000 to 300,000 yuan (about $27,800 to $41,700) by the time you can actually live in it. The “sea-view flat for a few tens of thousands” that people read about online is a figure that counts the flat and forgets the rest. I have yet to see one of those advertisements include the second number, because the second number is what kills the sale.
And then there is what an empty flat does while you are not in it. The sea air carries salt, and this coast is damp for a stretch every summer. Leave a flat shut for ten months and the metal inside it rusts, the bedding goes mouldy, the paint lifts off the walls. The next time you arrive for your summer holiday and unlock the door, the first thing you do is not look at the sea. It is three days of cleaning, de-moulding and fixing appliances before the flat is habitable again. The property fee is due all year round, whether or not anyone is inside. A house that nobody lives in decays faster than one that is used, and a seaside house decays faster than either.
I am not saying buying is impossible. I am saying the price on the paper is roughly half the true cost, and the other half arrives over the following two years, one repair at a time.
The renting side
Renting here is the thing this place does well, and it is cheap in a way that takes a while to believe.
A two-room flat — living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, balcony — rents for about 4,000 yuan a year. That is the year, not the month. Divide it out and it comes to around eleven yuan a day, about a dollar and a half. A smaller one-room flat, or a worse one, or one out at the edge of the strip, comes in under that: 4,000, 3,000, sometimes 2,000 or 2,500 for the year. I myself have paid between three and four thousand every year I have been here and never crossed four thousand.
You can pay more, and if you want a particular standard you will. A flat with a lift, central heating, modern decoration, a balcony with a sea view — that will cost more than 4,000 a year, and it is worth it if you have the money and you care about those things. That is the whole trade: this place lets you set your own level, and the floor is very low.
Finding one is not hard. There are more estate agents here than there are supermarkets; on some streets there is an agency every few doors. Arrive on the last coach at night, walk into any lit-up one, and they will have keys in a drawer. The stock is so large that most agents can show you something the same day.
Two things worth knowing before you sign.
The first is that landlords prefer annual rent and dislike monthly. The season here is two or three months of summer, and a landlord can make a year’s money out of those months alone. So if you want July and August only, expect to pay 2,000 or even 3,000 yuan for a single month (about $280 to $420), which is guest-house money. Rent by the year and you get the same flat at a fraction of that. The annual lease is not just convenient for them; it is much cheaper for you. Off-season short lets go for a few hundred a month, sometimes two or three hundred.
The second is that you must check the flat yourself, because nobody else will. Turn the taps on and see whether water comes and whether the pressure is there. Plug in the fridge and confirm it actually gets cold. Turn on the water heater and see how long it takes and whether it holds. Lift the mattress and look at the underside for mould; look behind the wardrobe for black patches. Have the agent or the owner hand over the water, electricity and gas cards in front of you and check the balances, because debts travel with the flat. This matters more here than it would in a city: so much of this housing has stood empty and untreated that appliances which look fine on the surface are rotten inside, and the leak starts the day after you pay.
And keep the paperwork. The agent’s responsibility ends seven days after you move in; after that, problems are yours. At the end of a lease it is common for an agent to find a reason to keep part of the deposit — a broken lamp, a scuffed wall — so photograph and film the flat when you take it. This is not cynicism. It is the local practice, and the people who get caught out are the ones who did not bother.
Why I do not buy
I have thought about this more than I have thought about almost anything else to do with money, and I have come out in the same place every time. The reasons are three, and they have stayed the same.
Freedom. I came here to get out of a cage, and a flat is one of the cages modern life has on offer. Buy one — even a cheap one, even a very cheap one — and you are pinned to the place. Your life starts organising itself around the flat: the repairs, the upkeep, the neighbours, the annual fee. You give it your attention whether you mean to or not. Renting is the opposite. Renting means I can leave. I do not know that I will be here forever. The day may come when I am tired of the winter, or want to spend a year in the mountains in Yunnan, and I want that day to cost me nothing but a coach ticket. My entire household fits in a suitcase and a few boxes of books. If I decide to go, I can be somewhere else in China within a few days. That is worth more to me than a deed with my name on it.
The arithmetic. Say I take 100,000 yuan (about $13,900) and buy a flat like the one I rent. Put that same money in the bank instead and at roughly 1.1 per cent a year it earns about 1,100 yuan (about $150) — not much, and it does not need to be much, because the rent is 4,000 a year. Now look at the other side: the price of flats here has been falling for years and shows no sign of turning. Buy, and you take on the depreciation and you lose the interest the money would have earned. One calculation people here like to repeat is that the price of a single flat, left as cash, is enough to rent in Silver Beach for twenty or thirty years. I have not found the arithmetic to disagree with it. For somebody who lives on a fixed pot of savings rather than a salary, keeping the pot intact and spending the interest is the whole game, and buying a flat is the opposite of that.
The risk you cannot see. The second-hand market here is not straightforward. A flat that has stood empty for a decade has been quietly deteriorating for a decade: damp in the walls, pipes that are on their last year, decoration that was poor when it went in. You will not see most of this on a two-hour viewing, and the owner is not going to volunteer it. Buy, and every one of those problems becomes yours — your money, your time, your weekends. Rent, and they stay the landlord’s. When the water heater goes, or the drain blocks, or the ceiling in the bathroom starts dripping, I make a phone call and somebody else deals with it. I have the right to live in the flat. I do not have the obligation to maintain it. That division is exactly what I want.
There is a plainer way to put all three of these, and I will put it plainly because it is the truth of my position: I do not want to be a mortgage-holder. The classic arrangement — buy the flat, take the loan, marry, have the child, buy the school district — is a whole life, and it is a fine life for many people, but I have watched it from close up and declined it. Not buying, not marrying, not having children has been, for me, the last small piece of stubbornness I have. I rent, and the price can go up or down without my caring, because it is not my money in the walls.
Who should buy
I am not against buying, and I am not writing this to talk you out of it. There is a group of people for whom buying here is the right answer, and the group is narrower than the public conversation suggests. It is one group.
Buy if you have decided to settle here — really settle: three to five years at the very least, and probably longer, with no plan to keep moving between cities. Only a long-term use of the flat can absorb the costs of owning it, and only then do you get to enjoy the low prices for what they are. Within that group, the ones it suits best are people who have already retired — no job to hold them anywhere, their time entirely their own — and who have enough pension and savings that a hundred or two hundred thousand yuan spent on a flat does not touch the money they need for the rest of their lives. If that is you, and you plan to be here every summer, or to bring grandchildren down for the school holidays year after year, then owning is a pleasure and a convenience, and renting for decades is the wasteful option, not the thrifty one.
Everybody else: do not buy.
If you are coming for a summer, for two months, once, renting is not a compromise — it is simply better. A good flat costs 1,000 or 2,000 a month in season; two months costs a couple of thousand yuan and you keep your flexibility completely. It does not matter how old you are, or how much you like the look of the sea from the balcony. Do not buy a flat to use for a fortnight a year.
And if you are young, I would say the same, more forcefully. Young people are the ones who come here imagining a way out — away from the rat race, into a cheap coastal life — and young people are the ones whose futures are least settled: work, city, marriage, none of it fixed. Buy a flat now and you have bought a liability you cannot sell, because the next buyer is no easier to find than you were. Plenty of young people here have bought, regretted it, put the flat back on the market, cut the price by half, and still not sold it. Rent for a few months first. If the coast is what you needed, the coast will still be there.
The shortest version of my advice, and the one I have repeated most often, is this: buy if you have the money and the decision costs you nothing — if you can spend it without a flicker of doubt. If you are running the numbers back and forth, if there is any hesitation at all, do not buy. Hesitation is information. Wait.
If you are going to buy anyway
Suppose you have read all of that and you are still going to buy. Fine. Then do these things, in this order.
Rent here for a full year first. A year of rent costs three or four thousand yuan, which is nothing next to what you are about to spend. Use it. Go through all four seasons. Find out whether the climate, the transport, the food, the lack of shops actually suit you — not in July, when the place is at its best, but in January, when it is at its worst. Use the year to walk round the compounds, compare layouts, floors and orientations, and learn what each one is really like. Half a year is not enough to understand this place. Only a full year shows you the swing between the two seasons: two months of noise and company, ten months of quiet, many compounds all but empty, streets dark by eight. Plenty of people discover they cannot stand that quiet, and it is much cheaper to discover it on a lease than a deed. And test the winter first, because winter is where most people break: most compounds here have no central heating, and anyone who has spent their life with it will find a Silver Beach winter hard in a way they did not expect.
Buy second-hand, not new. The second-hand stock is enormous and priced at the bottom; new build is three or four times the price for no corresponding gain. Even if you buy second-hand and strip the decoration out entirely and start again, you will still spend less than you would on a new flat a few streets away.
Look past the obvious advantages and at the hidden ones. A ground-floor flat with a garden sounds lovely — space to grow things, no stairs — but it is damper than the rest, and if there is a block in front of it, it may lose the winter sun altogether, which on this coast is a serious matter. A flat with a lift suits anyone whose legs are going, but the property fee is higher. A high floor in a walk-up is the cheapest thing here and the best value, until you are sixty and cannot get up the stairs with shopping. Match the flat to the life you will actually be living in it, not to the one you are imagining on the day you view it.
Time the season. Buy in the off-season. From May Day to National Day the town is fuller, buyers are around, and prices are firmer. In winter the same flat will be cheaper and the seller more willing.
And do not rush the paperwork, but do not fear it either. Look at many flats before you commit to one — the whole advantage of this market is that you can afford to be patient and there will always be another flat tomorrow. When you do decide, the transfer itself is straightforward: the local registry is efficient, and if the documents are all in order it can be finished in a day.
The sentence I would leave at the end of all this is not mine. It is the one line that sums up everything above, and it is this: a house is for living in. It is not a way of paying for a moment of enthusiasm.
My own lease
Since I am recommending it, here is what renting has actually cost me, year by year.
The first year, when I arrived in October, I signed for an annual rent of 4,000 yuan (about $560), a deposit of 1,000 (about $140), an agency fee of 200 (about $28), and a property fee of 506 (about $70) which I paid directly to the management office. The total I handed over that afternoon was 4,506 yuan. Water was 3.05 yuan a tonne, electricity 0.555 a unit, gas 2.8 a cubic metre, all metered and paid by me — which is another reason the annual rent is not the whole cost of living, only the largest line of it.
The second year the agent put it up. Rent plus agency fee came to 4,500 (about $625), and the lease ran from 26 October to 25 October. It was only later that somebody told me renewals here generally do not carry an agency fee, and that their own rent had not moved. So I had probably been paying for something I did not need to pay for. I mention it because it is typical: you learn the local rules by getting a few of them wrong.
The third year the same agent offered to renew at 3,500 (about $490). Think about that for a second. The first year was 4,000. The second year went up by 500. The third year the price came back down and undershot the first year. That is what a falling market looks like from the tenant’s side: the flat is worth less to the landlord every year, and you are the one who benefits.
Once, early on, I tried to rent directly from an owner instead, to cut the agent out. A woman from Beijing had a flat she wanted to let; we talked for an hour. She wanted 5,000 a year including the property fee and 500 yuan of utilities. I wanted 4,500. She thought someone young would only last a month or two and change his mind, and anyway she did not much care whether the flat was let or not. We did not agree, and she passed me on to another owner, and that did not work either. Renting directly saves you the fee and costs you the certainty. I went back to the agents.
Halfway through one of my years, the owner sold the flat out from under me. That is a risk of renting, and I do not pretend otherwise. I had to move. The agent was decent about it — he found me a near-identical flat in the same compound and helped me carry my things across — but I still had to move, and I have not forgotten that it could happen again. Renting is not security. It is flexibility, and flexibility cuts both ways.
As for buying, I have a number in my head, and I have had it for a while. A two-room flat, third or fourth floor, walk-up, for 100,000 yuan (about $13,900) — at that price I would think about it seriously. When I looked, that flat was still around 150,000 (about $20,800). The gap between the price and my price is the whole reason I am still renting, and it has been closing on its own, without my doing anything. The last agent I spoke to told me, cheerfully, that the flats keep getting harder to sell and keep getting cheaper, and that if I waited two years there would be more on the market at lower prices than I could look at in a year.
So I have decided to wait two years. I said I would go away for a year or two and come back in 2026 and see what a flat is worth then, and after that I would maybe buy one and settle here, and put my books on real shelves instead of the ones I have been carrying between rentals. That is the plan, such as it is. But I notice I have been saying “two more years” for a while now, and each time I say it, the flat on the bus shelter is still there, still flapping, still with the sun faded out of it, and I have still never called the number.