China’s housing crash nuked my apartment value by almost 50%. Here’s what I actually did about it.

Long story short, I bought an apartment in China back in 2021 for ¥6M due to my marriage with my wife, took a ¥3.5M mortgage, and thought I was being responsible because the place had “balanced” features — decent infrastructure, okay school, not too far from the subway, basically the kind of location that’s fine but nobody brags about. The apartment is in okay quality, with 3 bedrooms and 175 sqm of spacious living spaces and very minimal amount of common space (公摊面积)because it’s a so-called 4th gen living experience.

Five years later, after feeding the mortgage monster nonstop, I still owe ¥3.2M… while the apartment itself is now also worth ¥3.2M. I managed to lose money while paying money. And of course my parents told me initially to buy a smaller unit in the city center, and if I had listened, I’d only be down 15-20% instead of starring in a financial tragedy.

The long‑term math is even funnier: if I actually paid the full 30‑year mortgage, I’d end up shelling out around ¥6M in principal plus interest, plus ¥2.5M of initial down payment, and by then the apartment would probably be worth ¥2M — or less, depending on how fast the population shrinks.

So what did I do? I moved my whole family to New Zealand permanently, left nothing behind except the mortgage, and started looking for a house near Auckland because location matters everywhere, not just China. And the biggest lesson? Do not buy major assets in China at least for the next 10-15 years, unless you enjoy watching them depreciate like a used smartphone, and never invest heavily in places where money cannot be moved in and out freely.