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Ask HN: Where do Chinese property investor hang out online?

4 points by deftnerd ↗ HN
I always hear that one of the problems with the housing market in the US, Canada, the UK and other places is that a lot of "foreign investors" are scooping up the properties. Apparently it's to diversify their portfolio in ways that protects their worth from their national currency price fluctuations.

Is there an online community where some of these property investors might hang out? I want to see if I can convince someone to rent to me in exchange for Bitcoin or shares in my startup or something equally unconventional.

4 comments

[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 19.5 ms ] thread
baybal2
www.vansky.com =D
deftnerd
This is fascinating! From what I can understand with my poor chinese, This is a news portal and forum just for Chinese expats in Vancouver or Chinese citizens who have an interest in Vancouver.

It's such a niche topic and community, but the forum has half a million posts and a peak of 4000 people online at the same time. That makes me think that there has to be over 100,000 registered users.

I need to consider the Chinese market more for niche sites. With so many billions of people, a "niche" site could be amazingly popular.

baybal2
But better fly to Shenzhen and go network around during property sale evenents
deftnerd
I cross posted this to /r/china to get some input from a different community and this comment was made. Thought I would replicate it here in case anyone else finds it interesting

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From /u/ThomSEN1

Honestly the ones that are buying overseas are probably unwilling to be openly discussing it online. They aren't hedging against exchange as much as they are hedging against having to stay in China in the long run, or simply getting freehold land somewhere in the world or getting some of their net worth out of the country.

The foreigners that have networks to tap into these sorts of guys will be employees of real estate companies. The one thing you may look to do is visit display suites in first tier cities for upcoming developments. In Australia, companies like Mirvac, Sunland etc all set up sales displays SH/BJ/GZ etc to sell apartments off the plan, you might be able to make a connection by chance at one of those sort of events.

They won't be looking for bitcoin but they will likely be interested in owning some of your company, as that means they can get their name on a shareholders register somewhere overseas and as such they might be able to move money out through that. In some cases they won't even care what the company does, as long as its registered offshore. Building high net-worth connections in china is hard, (but fun, if you like long meals and 8 hour baiju/cigarette binges!). Nepotism is the name of the game unfortunately.

If you're looking for investment in the tech sector, focus on SZ/HK. Most of the money is moving to the west via the HK financial sector, and Shenzhen is clearly the tech hub so people may be more willing to adopt bitcoin or similar concepts.

Get personal business cards if you don't have them already, be prepared to hand them to everyone. You might get lucky with a mission like this but it'll be hard if you don't have some connections already unfortunately.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/4ohish/where_do_prop...