SEVERAL real estate speculators in Shenzhen shared their secrets for making a fortune in a short period of time by investing in pre-owned apartments in the city, according to financial news app Duchuang.

    Pang Ming, one of the speculators, said that he had earned millions of yuan over the past few months after making investments in Shenzhen’s pre-owned housing market. He and several friends bought over a dozen small apartments near Jingtian Metro Station in Futian District at the end of 2015.

    They each bought a 30-square-meter apartment for around 1.9 million yuan (US$275,362) and a 40-square-meter apartment for 2.4 million yuan, and then sold these apartments after the housing market heated up and each apartment was priced between 2.5 to 3 million yuan.

    Another speculator, Chen Ze, registered an automobile service company in Longgang District in order to be eligible to buy apartments in Shenzhen. He purchased around 50 small apartments in Pingshan, Longgang and Luohu with an average price of 7,000 yuan per square meter in early 2015, and now the average price has soared to around 20,000 yuan per square meter.

    Two other speculators, Zhang Ming and Li Wei, bought 18 apartments in a residential estate in Luohu District in 2009. After their purchases, the average price of the apartments in the estate went up by 3,000 yuan per square meter. They sold them for a profit.

    Some speculators also team up to drive up the average price of apartments in an estate. Dai Zong bought three 42-square-meter apartments in a Futian estate in 2014, when each apartment cost him 1.7 million yuan.

    Dai wanted to sell these apartments after the average price soared to 2.7 million yuan early last year. In a QQ chat group of homeowners in the estate, Dai asked the other homeowners to raise the asking prices for their apartments to 2.9 million yuan so that he could sell his apartments for 2.85 million yuan.

    An article that was circulated on WeChat last September called for homeowners in a housing estate in Shenzhen to raise their asking prices and listed guidelines for prices of 13 kinds of apartments in the estate.

    The article said that many homeowners had set their asking prices too low because they lacked confidence and weren’t familiar with the housing market, according to the report.

    (Zhang Yang)