Can anyone recommend a good real estate agency or realtor that can help find an apartment/house to buy/rent.

thanks!

Unless you have paid tax in Kunming for 12 months you cannot get a mortgage. New regulation. Affects Chinese nationals as well.

If you already own one property in China, you cannot buy a second property in Kunming, unless you have a Kunming HuKou (Household ID, for Chinese nationals). Even with cash. New regulation.

If you already own 2 or more properties in China, you cannot buy in Kunming, even with cash. New regulation

Unless you have been resident in China for 12 months, you cannot buy property. Old regulation.

Regards real estate agents, things work differently to how they do back home. People who have property go to their local real estate agent, and this can be really local. Often 10 agents will have the same prop in the window, but only one will have the keys. There can be as many as 30 independent real estate agents in one small area.

Best way to find property is to go to the neighbourhoods where you think you could live. Have a good walk around to get a feel for the place, and look at buildings you might like to live in.

Look at local agents windows. There will always be at least one that looks more professional, possibly part of a chain. Hit these first. If you can, find an interpreter that you can trust not to try and act like an agent and try to get a commission.

Deposits vary, usually 2 months rent. You may also be expected to stump up the first 3 months rent in advance, but not always. The agent may expect a finders fee of one months rent (you pay), but this is easily negotiated down.

If you are looking to rent higher end accommodation or a house, there is a shortage of this type of property in Kunming. We tried to find 'middle class' prop of over 150m around Green Lake a few month ago. There were only 2 apartments available. We also looked for houses in the Dianchi area, only about 6, and only two were suitable.

There is a lot of empty prop around Kunming, but most of it not decorated (no kitchen, no bathroom), and of the little that is decorated many are unfurnished.

Thanks for your help much appreciated.

FYI - In SOME areas - the plethora of empty properties are the results of RE speculators.

In some areas??
In most areas, ;-)

Tiger makes some good points although I feel like pointing out that getting a discount on the agent's fee is much more likely to happen at the independant shops. Most chain/franchise agents are not allowed to negotiate. Also you can use the fact that many agents try to rent the same flat out to ask around for a discount. Last time we found a new place we subtly hinted that the agent down the street was willing to negotiate and we ended up paying half the regular fee in the end.

Even the official China is having a hard time denying there is a gigantic bubble building up these days. A few owners want to find tenants but a large part of them are fine with just having the flat sit vacant and unfinished. Some Chinese people even think it's not worth the hassle to rent out.

Agents also remove information the owners put up outside or on their doors looking for tenants in order to get more business (another reason not to pay agents full fees if possible -they are pretty unscrupulous). This practice has been going on for decades now and direct owner-tenant relationships have been reduced to knowing someone personally or over the internet because of it.

@Tigertiger. Do you have a link to the "Can't buy unless you've paid tax for 12 months" info? I think I need to look into that.

This is interesting. I didn't realise that the housing reform was in effect outside of Shanghai, Beijing and Chongqing. Do these new regulations also apply to smaller cities like Dali and Lijiang?

I have been providing real-estate related investments and consultancy service in Kunming for the past 2 years and am very familiar with the Kunming selling/buying/rental market. For rental's you can Check www.fang4u.com or contact me at info@fang4u.com for any question
Good luck!

Danmairen

I can't give you a link. Try Kunming Govt. Website.

We got the information from China Merchants Bank, when we enquired about selling property A (mortgaged) to buy property B (with a mortgage). If we had bought in December, we could have done it.

This is not a case of some bank counter bunny not knowing what to do. My wife is in the industry, and was using contacts.

Reason for most people not renting, it isn't worth it.

As a side note for those who do not know, when you get the keys for a new property in China it is undecorated. This means there is a bare screed floor, maybe no proper staircase, one electric socket in each room, one light fitting, skim coat on the walls of most rooms (except bathrooms and kitchen), no sinks, no toilet, no kitchen, no internal doors. All you get is walls, roof, external doors, windows, and one set of services coming into the house.
You need to decorate.

We have an empty property, because of its location we would need to decorate nicely. This would cost us at least 600k and easily 1m rmb. It would take us 4-10 years to get the decoration costs back, depending on how the rental market for town houses is fairing. By that time we would want to redecorate to some degree anyway.
We could spend only 200k, but where we live we would not find a tenant, and rent would have to be so low, it would still take years to get the money back.

Decorating does not add greatly to the value of a property, as most new owners will want to re-decorate.

Additionally, the house purchase can be done on a mortgage, the decoration will be for cash.

tigertiger
You didn't (or cannot?) negotiate the decoration into the home mtg?