Author: Ma Jichao
It was the peak season for graduates to leave school and find employment, but Wang Hui, the landlord, found that her house had been on the market for more than three months, but it had not been rented out so far.
This small two-bedroom house with an area of 80 square meters is located in the southwest of Zhengzhou. It was originally her and her family's own residence. This year, due to the addition of the family, Wang Hui changed to a new house, so she wanted to sell this small two-bedroom house, but found that, House prices have fallen again and again, from 1 million in 2017 to 800,000 today, but it is still difficult to sell.
It is still difficult to rent after a 40% drop
In desperation, Wang Hui decided to rent it out temporarily.
Since May of this year, she has listed the house on several platforms such as Shell House and 58.com. Initially, the rental price she listed was 1,800 yuan/month, and almost half a month later, almost no one cared about it. , had to lower the rental price to 1,500 yuan, but it has not been rented out so far. In the end, she decided to lower the rent to 1,300 yuan.
"How did it become so difficult to rent a house?" Wang Hui was quite unable to let go of this. The same small two-bedroom house could be rented for 2,400 yuan or more in 2017. Now the price has dropped by more than 40%, and it is still difficult to rent. rent.
The same situation happened to Zhao Ling, a landlord in the same city.
Zhao Ling's house is located near the North Third Ring Road in Zhengzhou. In 2017, her two-bedroom with an area of 88 square meters could be rented for 3,200 yuan. Now, she has successively reduced the rent from 2,600 yuan to 2,400 yuan, and then to 2200 yuan, but still can't rent it out.
At the beginning of 2020, in the face of bargaining tenants, Zhao Ling reduced the price to 2,100 yuan before finally renting out the house.
Unexpectedly, in 2022, because the tenant decided to go back to her hometown after losing her job, when Zhao Ling wanted to rent the house again, the new tenant even thought 2,000 yuan per month was too expensive.
"In previous years, I was too lazy to deal with such tenants," said Zhao Ling, who has several houses in Zhengzhou.
In the past, if a tenant negotiated a price on the phone, she would be very impatient and immediately replace the next one, but now she no longer has the "domineering" she used to have. How dare you pick and choose?" Zhao Ling laughed at herself, a house that is vacant for a month is a loss of several thousand yuan, plus the mortgage has to be repaid every month, where does she have the capital for "empty rent" now?
Zhengzhou, with a population of 10 million, is it really so difficult to rent a house now?
Qi Hangfei, who has nearly 10 years of experience in housing leasing, also sighed in the face of the interview with China Business News.
The former "room robbery"
"In previous years, near Jingsha Square, a standard room was rented to 1,670 per month, and the occupancy rate was still very high; now, I have dropped to 1,300, but the occupancy rate has not been able to go up." Qi Hangfei He said that his company manages more than 1,000 houses in Zhengzhou. From the rental data in the past few years, most of the rents are in a state of decline, "Look at the specific location, basically a room will drop (compared to the peak period) 300~500 yuan."
Qi Hangfei told Yicai that there are also some houses whose rents not only did not fall, but also rose slightly. However, most of such houses are located near the CBD and high-speed railway station in Zhengdong New District, where office buildings are concentrated, and are also located in Zhengdong. In the new district, but the location is slightly remote from the office building, the rent is also in the falling range.
"For example, a building in Vanke can be regarded as an apartment with better property services in Zhengzhou East District. A few years ago, a standard room could be rented for 1,780, but now it can only be rented for 1,450."
A data from the Zhengzhou Branch of the Shell Research Institute also confirms the downward trend of housing rents in Zhengzhou: From 2017 to 2020, the average annual housing rent in Zhengzhou dropped by 7%. Among them, the rent in Zhengzhou in 2020 was 25.96 yuan/㎡·month, which was a decrease from 2019. 9%.
The latest data from the Zhuge Housing Data Research Center shows that in July 2022, the housing rent in Zhengzhou has fallen to 25.07 yuan/m2·month, which is lower than the historical peak of 31 yuan/m2·month in Zhengzhou’s rental market. 20%.
For nearly 10 years, Qi Hangfei has witnessed the boom and decline of Zhengzhou's housing rental market.
"Before 2015, the rent in Zhengzhou increased by 5% to 10% almost every year." Qi Hangfei said that at that time, he was working in the largest long-term rental apartment company in Zhengzhou, responsible for the expansion of housing, "Actually, It's just a house grab." As soon as he heard that there was another house being rented out to the outside world, his colleagues who heard the news began to compete to raise the price. For a house, if you offered 3,000, he dared to offer 3,100. As a result, in those years, he The company I work for has obtained a lot of housing at a high price, but it becomes a "burden" that cannot be thrown away when the rent falls, and eventually becomes the fuse of bankruptcy.
After reconsidering the pain, he chose Qi Hangfei, who started his own business, and no longer dared to grab housing at a high price. Instead, he chose another relatively low-risk "asset-light" model: he would no longer be a "second landlord", and was only responsible for helping the landlord manage However, some of his peers have always insisted on being “second landlords”. Due to the overall decline in rents, their incomes eventually became upside down, and they had to close down or start “playing rogues” with landlords. Reduce rent.
Regarding the reasons for the decline in rent, Qi Hangfei said that the most important reason is of course the epidemic. The successive epidemics have caused business difficulties for many small and medium-sized enterprises. Some small and medium-sized enterprises who were originally working in Zhengzhou were forced to close down, while employees Forced to lose their jobs, without a source of income, and unable to find new jobs for a long time, some people either choose to return to their hometowns or leave their homes to seek development opportunities in other places.
"Including many of our tenants, many of them are now on short-term rentals. They are afraid of losing their jobs. They are even more afraid that they will not be able to find a job if they lose their jobs. They will also be upset." But in Qi Hangfei's view, apart from the epidemic, Zhengzhou has The large-scale delivery of resettlement houses since then has also had an impact on the rental market in Zhengzhou.
"Setting up a stall for rent"
Around 2013, Zhengzhou began to demolish and renovate nearly 400 urban villages, involving millions of people. At that time, a large amount of rental demand was released in a short period of time, which eventually pushed up rents. The resettlement houses were delivered around 2016. On the one hand, the original demand for rental housing disappeared; on the other hand, there were hundreds of thousands more houses in the rental market. To make matters worse, around 2016, the housing prices in Zhengzhou changed overnight. Seeing that there is no hope of buying a house, a large number of young people simply left Zhengzhou, which further led to a decline in the demand for rental housing.
The Zhengzhou New Urbanization Leading Group once stated in the "Notice on Promoting the Online Signing of Resettlement Houses in the Pilot Program" that the transformation of urban villages in the past ten years has contributed about 60 million square meters of resettlement houses to the main city of Zhengzhou and its surrounding suburbs. Excluding about 20% of the villagers living there, most of the remaining 48 million square meters will enter the rental market.
Faced with the current situation in the rental market from "one room is hard to find" to "one tenant is hard to find", some resettlement housing communities with a large supply have begun to "set up stalls for rent", and some owners even for one tenant. An altercation occurs.
In a resettlement housing community located in the western suburbs of Zhengzhou, the first financial interview found that the landlords who were dragged by the rent-seeking signs at the entrance of the community were surrounded by water, and when they saw young people passing by, some landlords came to "beg for rent".
"I can't help it. The whole family is pointing to the rent of these suites. It's thousands of yuan a month." One of the women in her fifties said that her family was divided into five suites. A few years ago , I don't have to worry about renting at all. Now, two of the houses have been vacant for almost three months, and they have not been rented out.
In the final analysis, there must be "people".
In order to attract more talents into Zhengzhou, since April this year, the Zhengzhou Municipal Government has successively issued new policies for talents, and has continuously optimized and adjusted the industrial structure of Zhengzhou to create an employment environment for talents to settle down.
The latest data shows that at present, Zhengzhou has attracted 55,700 young talents to Zhengzhou for development.
However, these are still a drop in the bucket compared to the huge number of housing rentals in Zhengzhou, which means that it will take time for Wang Hui, Zhao Ling and others to find housing rental difficulties and the downward trend in rents.
(Wang Hui and Zhao Ling are pseudonyms in the text)