Thursday, September 3, 2009

Rent or Buy?

One thing we will never do is buy an apartment or house in China. So when you buy an apartment or townhouse it comes with concrete walls and floors. It is up to you to provide the hard wood flooring, carpet, drywall, paint, toilet, shower, kitchen, etc. This is nice and all if you want to live there, you have free reign. If you want to rent your apartment, this is also nice because you don't have to worry about fixing it up and modeling. The renter does that. And should you decide to try and make your apartment more marketable by providing these elements to your house, no one will rent it, because while the layout is nice, they don't like the floors you picked! What??? Why as a renter am I going to shell out all this cash to renovate someone else's apartment. What financial benefit do I get? We have no idea. Apparently a woman at one of the other schools decided to buy an apartment and live in it while she was teaching in China. She has been trying to sell it for 2 years, because no one likes the way she renovated it!! Crazy.

1 comment:

  1. Weird! It could be cool, like you said, if you planned on living there forever (or at least long enough that it wouldn't be such a waste to eventually rip everything out and bring it back to bare bones for the next owner to fix up), but is that what people do? Move in, fix it up, then rip it out (otherwise they won't be able to sell?).

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