CHINESE property developers are turning to offbeat marketing gimmicks and give-aways as they battle to shift massive inventories of unsold homes and survive the country’s biggest economic slowdown since the global financial crisis.

    Discounts can still run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars but instead of smashing competitors on price, the emerging trend for Chinese property marketing is simply to create a buzz around new projects, analysts said.

    “Consumers are too used to price cuts and promotions like ‘buy one get one free,’ so they want new gimmicks,” real estate consultancy Knight Frank senior director Thomas Lam said.

    The strategy leaves developers’ already squeezed margins largely intact, while making buyers feel like winners.

    “Although there are many innovative promotions in the market, they translate to an average discount of 10 percent. It’s not that big,” industry consultant China Real Estate Information Corp. analyst Fang Ling said.

    China’s largest residential developer China Vanke is using social media in a series of quirky campaigns which chief executive Yu Liang describes as “innovation based on grassroots.”

    In a campaign similar to Tourism Australia’s “Best Jobs in the World” promotion, Vanke plans to offer free accommodation for a year in some of its new apartments, as long as its guests share their experiences on sites like Weibo, China’s largest microblog by users. It has already offered its “free-stay experience” for one-day and 7-day stays.

    Vanke also renewed an association with Alibaba’s online marketplace Taobao earlier this month in the southwest city of Chengdu to lure shoppers with special offers and discounts.

    From Aug. 25 to the end of September, Vanke gave online shoppers a discount of at least 50,000 yuan (US$8,170) when they bought a home featured in one of its 23 projects across 12 cities. Discounts went as high as 2 million yuan for those who had spent the same amount on Taobao in the previous year.

    The firm sold 1.3 billion yuan worth of apartments from the promotion, Yu told a press conference last month, with an average discount of 42,000 yuan or about 2 percent.

    “Vanke is making use of the mentality, tools and methods of the Internet to do our business better,” Yu said.

    Mid-sized developer China Merchants Property Development Co. this month launched a three-month campaign to allow customers who shop with the company’s affiliated credit card to earn discounts of up to 300,000 yuan on property purchases.

    Last month, Poly Real Estate launched a promotion that gave discounts of 10,000 yuan for every kilogram of weight a homebuyer lost. It is unclear how many buyers have taken up the offer, and Poly Real Estate representatives were unavailable for comment.

    Official figures released last week showed growth in China real estate investment slowed in the first nine months of 2014, while property sales and new construction tumbled, helping to drag broader economic growth to a near six-year low.

    China slashed mortgage rates and down payment levels for some homebuyers last month for the first time since the 2008/09 global crisis, although analysts say it could take some time before such stimulus measures are felt in higher prices.

    In the meantime, price declines have spread to a record number of cities and banks remain reluctant to extend new loans to the sector.

    (SD-Agencies)