Desperate property developers in China have resorted to gifts like new cars, free parking spaces, phones and other consumer goods to attract homebuyers and boost flagging sales.
These incentives are just the tip of the iceberg in a crisis involving hundreds of billions of dollars in home builder debt, trillions in local government debt and at least a billion empty apartments.
But it wasn’t always the case. Since China’s economic liberalization in the 1970s and housing reforms in the late 1980s, locals have flocked to properties as the investment vehicle of choice over alternatives such as the stock market.
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/02/29/how-chinas-property-bubble-burst.html