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发帖数: 538 | 1 一个朋友转发的，写得很有意思，大家看看 :)
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http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-15/chinese-home-bu
Why Are Chinese Millionaires Buying Mansions in an L.A. Suburb?
By Karen Weise October 15, 2014
Why Are Chinese Millionaires Buying Mansions in an L.A. Suburb?
Photograph by Damon Casarez for Bloomberg Businessweek
“Oh, hey! How ya’ doin’?” Raleigh Ornelas hollers, leaning out the
window of his spotless white pickup truck. He’s recognized the man across
the street, a developer standing in front of a Tuscan-style mansion under
construction. “Where have you been hiding at? I call you, you don’t call
me.”
Ornelas is an informal broker in Arcadia, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb at
the foot of the San Gabriel mountains. He’s been keeping an eye out for the
builder, an Asian man with a slight comb-over who goes by Mark. Ornelas has
found two older homeowners who’ve finally agreed to sell their properties,
and he knows that Mark, like all developers here, needs land on which to
build mansions for an influx of rich clients from mainland China.
Ornelas rattles off addresses on a nearby street. “Three-eleven, that guy,
he’s wack,” he says, shaking his head. “He wants 2.8.” He means million
dollars. “And then 354, they want $2 million.”
The lot is 17,000 square feet. “Seventeen for 2 mil?” Mark asks,
incredulous.
“I know,” Ornelas says. “They’re going crazy.”
A year ago the property would have gone for $1.3 million, but Arcadia is
booming. Residents have become used to postcards offering immediate, all-
cash deals for their property and watching as 8,000-square-foot homes go up
next door to their modest split levels. For buyers from mainland China,
Arcadia offers excellent schools, large lots with lenient building codes,
and a place to park their money beyond the reach of the Chinese government.
The city, population 57,600, projects that about 150 older homes—53 percent
more than normal—will be torn down this year and replaced with mansions.
The deals happen fast and are rarely listed publicly. Often, the first
indication that a megahouse is coming next door is when the lawn turns brown
. That means the neighbor has stopped watering and green construction
netting is about to go up.
Ornelas matches sellers with developers. Deals happen fast; many aren’t
listed publicly
Damon Casarez for Bloomberg Businessweek
Ornelas matches sellers with developers. Deals happen fast; many aren’t
listed publicly
This flood of money, arriving from China despite strict currency controls,
has helped the city build a $20 million high school performing arts center
and the local Mercedes dealership expand. “Thank God for them coming over
here,” says Peggy Fong Chen, a broker in Arcadia for many years. “They
saved our recession.” The new residents are from China’s rising
millionaire class—entrepreneurs who’ve made fortunes building railroads in
Tibet, converting bioenergy in Beijing, and developing real estate in
Chongqing. One co-owner of a $6.5 million house is a 19-year-old college
student, the daughter of the chief executive of a company the state controls.
Arcadia is a concentrated version of what’s happening across the U.S. The
Hurun Report, a magazine in Shanghai about China’s wealthy elite, estimates
that almost two-thirds of the country’s millionaires have already
emigrated or plan to do so. They’re scooping up homes from Seattle to New
York, buying luxury goods on Fifth Avenue, and paying full freight to send
their kids to U.S. colleges. Chinese nationals hold roughly $660 billion in
personal wealth offshore, according to Boston Consulting Group, and the
National Association of Realtors says $22 billion of that was spent in the
past year acquiring U.S. homes. Arcadia has become a hotbed of the buying
binge in the past several years, and long-standing residents are torn—giddy
at the rising property values but worried about how they’re transforming
their town. And they’re increasingly nervous about what would happen to the
local economy if the deluge of Chinese cash were to end.
Back on the street corner, Ornelas and Mark agree to meet for coffee to
discuss other deals. Before he drives away, Ornelas asks if the developer
wants to speak with a reporter. Mark declines, saying he tries to keep a low
profile. “See?” Ornelas says as he pulls away, leaning toward the
passenger seat and raising his eyebrows. “Everything’s hush-hush here in
Arcadia.”
For almost a century after its founding in 1903, Arcadia was white and
conservative. In the late 1930s more than 90 percent of the city’s property
owners signed agreements, circulated by the Chamber of Commerce, to sell
only to white buyers. Its Santa Anita racetrack held about 19,000 Japanese
Americans as they were relocated to internment camps during World War II. In
the early 1980s an influx of immigrants from Taiwan arrived, drawn in large
part to the great public schools. A second wave came from Hong Kong after
the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. The city’s Asian population grew from 4
percent in 1980 to 59 percent in 2010. There were tensions at first—a
letter in a local newspaper praised a proposed ban on non-English
storefronts, writing, “Please leave your Asian signs in the old country and
get Americanized.” Over time, the new residents got involved in civic life
, joining the Rotary Club, entering local government, and opening businesses
such as Din Tai Fung Dumpling House, a Taiwanese restaurant tucked in the
corner of a strip mall.
Arcadia has no real downtown, only low-rise commercial stretches lined with
real estate offices and boba tea shops; Din Tai Fung is the closest thing
there is to a central hub. Hostesses with walkie-talkies manage the hourlong
wait of people clamoring for plump soup dumplings and pork buns. It was
here, a decade ago, that Ornelas broke into Chinese real estate. Leaving
lunch one day, he spotted a Ferrari parked outside. “Boy, that’s a
beautiful car,” he said. The owner was Chinese and asked Ornelas if he
wanted to take it for a drive. Ornelas squeezed in and took a quick spin. As
he returned, a white man walked by and made a racial slur about the owner.
“I said, ‘Leave the guy alone,’ ” Ornelas recalls. The talk
escalated into a fistfight, which ended badly for the heckler. Ornelas is a
Vietnam veteran who spent years bare-knuckle boxing for cash while working
as a longshoreman. “The Chinese guy goes, ‘I’m a stranger. Why did you
stick up for me?’ I said, ‘We’re all equal in this world, man.’ ”
After that, Ornelas says, “I just met people from him, and then I got into
different developers.”
“Obviously if your house isn’t feng shui-friendly, it’s like we’re not
even going to have a conversation”
Ornelas matches them up with sellers. He swings by garage sales to chat up
owners, and as he drives Arcadia’s streets, he looks for signs a homeowner
may need money. On a blistering hot day in July, he goes scouting through
the city’s foothills. “The roof is popping in that one there,” he says,
pointing to an older ranch house. “This one, they put a new roof on, but
the house is in bad shape.” Ornelas stops at a corner lot, where a property
is under construction. “Look at how big that house is,” he says. “Ooof.
Gigantic.”
As Ornelas tells it, last year the real estate website Zillow (Z) had
estimated the property’s value at $1.2 million when he, on behalf of a
developer, offered the owner $1.5 million. The owner’s brother, who worked
in law enforcement, called Ornelas to ask if he was laundering money. “I
told him, ‘That’s what the house is worth to me,’ you know? And he kind
of investigated to see if it was dirty money. Everything was on the uppity-
up, so he sold it to us.” Where Ornelas’s tales can be checked against
public records, they stand up—Zillow did make the lower estimate, the house
did sell for $1.5 million, and the owner’s brother is a sergeant with the
county sheriff’s department. (The lawman didn’t respond to a request for
comment.)
Next, Ornelas drives over to one in a string of construction sites in the
city’s Upper Rancho neighborhood, where large lots line curving streets
shaded by gracious oak trees. At the site, buzz saws blare, and stacks of
plywood lie on a concrete foundation. Richard Smith, the sun-tanned owner of
a construction company working on seven homes in Arcadia, walks over to
talk shop. Smith is building the 11,000-square-foot home for a developer who
expects to sell it, he says, for $8 million to $9 million. Smith grew up in
Arcadia, and his company has only Asian clients. They have certain
preferences. “Obviously, if your house isn’t feng shui-friendly, it’s
like we’re not even going to have a conversation,” he says. That means
minding the number of stairs, the directions rooms face, and how materials
line up. “And understanding the value of water, that’s probably one of my
key strengths,” he says. “If you go to any successful businessman in China
, or even here, they generally will have a picture of water behind their
desk.” He whips out his phone and swipes to photos of a project with a
waterfall cascading off the top of a gazebo and into a backyard pool.
A teardown that sold for $2.75 million in July 2013
Photograph by Damon Casarez for Bloomberg Businessweek
A teardown that sold for $2.75 million in July 2013
Smith says many of the newest buyers in Arcadia don’t speak English. “They
’ve just come here,” he says. “They’re on that EB—what’s it called?”
He means the EB-5 visas that the U.S. grants to foreigners who plow at least
$500,000 into American development projects. Congress created the program
in 1990 to spur investment, and demand for the visas has grown recently.
This year, for the first time, the government gave away the annual
allocation of 10,000 visas before the year was over, with Chinese nationals
snapping up 85 percent. Brokers in the area say it’s the most common way
buyers are coming to town. “Once they obtain residency, they want to bring
their family over and get the United States education,” says real estate
agent Ricky Seow. “They can start a new life in California.”
Taillights whiz by as 19-year-old Cheng Qianrong heads east along the
freeway that runs from Los Angeles International Airport toward Arcadia, in
a video she posts in June to her 22,000 Instagram followers. Later that
night she stands in a marble kitchen, points a gold iPhone at a mirror, and,
with a hip to the side, snaps a picture of her reflection, writing, “I’m
finally home.”
Loading
。。
View on Instagram
A sophomore studying business at the University of Oregon, Cheng, who goes
by Heli in the U.S., is a minor social media celebrity in China. In selfies,
her long, straight hair and wide-eyed gaze make her look younger than she
is. Her followers express awe for her style and gush at photos of her
enjoying a smoothie; posing with stuffed animals; and smiling with a
birthday cake made to look like a stack of Tiffany boxes.
In late 2013, Cheng and her mother, Wang Jun, bought a 9,000-square-foot
house with a pool and spa in Arcadia for $6.5 million. According to an L.A.
property filing, Wang’s husband is Cheng Qingtao. He’s CEO of China
Huayang Economic & Trade Group, one of the first state-owned companies set
up by the central government, which still owns a majority stake. Heli’s two
-story chateau-style home is only a few miles from one owned by her aunt,
who’s married to Cheng’s older brother, Cheng Qingbo. Qingbo was the first
private owner of railroads in China and, by 2013, was the country’s 257th-
richest person, worth an estimated $1.06 billion, Hurun says. In June,
Shanghai police arrested Qingbo for allegedly duping people into investments
, including a project that, China Business News says, didn’t exist.
For most Arcadians, it would be hard to know if Heli owned the house next
door. A member of one homeowners association estimates that about 20 percent
of the new purchases sit empty, and for those who don’t speak Mandarin,
language barriers have made it hard to share more than a wave with neighbors
. For many sales, public records provide no way to understand who the new
owners are. A recorded deed may show just an English transliteration of a
buyer’s name, with no signature. Some public documents provide small clues:
a second address in a luxury condo near Tiananmen Square; a seal if a
document has been notarized at the U.S. Embassy in Guangzhou; a husband who
relinquishes rights to the land to his wife; or a signature in Chinese
characters.
Chinese nationals hold $660 billion in personal wealth offshore; they spent
$22 billion on U.S. homes in the past year
Some of those clues match up with public documents in China. A mile north of
the Chengs, Fu Youhong and Zhang Jian, a couple who founded a
pharmaceutical distributor in China before starting a business converting
agricultural waste into energy, bought a $3.5 million home advertised as a
“spectacular brand-new French Normandy Estate.” Pesticide manufacturer
Huifeng International USA got into the boom early, in 2012, and for $3.4
million bought a house with a grand circular staircase and Swedish sauna.
The company says the property is used as an office for its trading business
and not as a personal home. And a $3.2 million property in one of Arcadia’s
rare gated communities was sold to a woman from Guangzhou named Zeng Fang,
who runs a network of immigration sites, one of which, baby-usa.net, tells
Chinese mothers they can deliver babies at Arcadia Methodist Hospital.
A few miles south, another new house, this one with Tuscan styling and
Moorish window treatments, sold last year to a woman named Jin Liping. Her
husband, Du Jianming, is the owner of one of China’s largest private
builders of steel structures. His company has built bridges in Shanghai and
connecting railways on the Tibetan Plateau. His wife bought the 8,000-square
-foot house in Arcadia for $4.8 million in September 2013, around the same
time the couple faced financial pressures at home. They lost three lawsuits
in China related to unpaid loans, but their home in California looks in peak
condition, with little red ribbons tied around the topiary by the front
door.
Arcadia Sales Frenzy
A goldenrod-yellow house on South 6th Avenue belongs to Tao Weisheng and Du
Xiaojuan, who develop homes and run hotels in Chongqing. Tao is known in
China for collecting calligraphy and paintings—and for reportedly paying
bribes to bureaucrats. According to state-run media, in 2004, Tao and a
business partner paid a local official’s gambling debt at a Macau casino.
The official had given them a land certificate they needed for a loan. In
2010 the court found the official guilty of taking a bribe and gave him a
suspended death sentence. The prosecutor didn’t charge Tao and his partner.
The homeowners or their representatives declined to comment or did not
respond to interview requests.
Lately, groups of Chinese investors have pooled their money to buy Arcadian
homes, which often aren’t occupied. More than 400 residents showed up at a
community meeting with the police department this spring, in part concerned
about a spate of burglaries targeting empty mansions. When there are leaks
or other problems with a property, even the city struggles to identify who’
s responsible. “Who do we contact? Where do we contact them?” says Jim
Kasama, the community development administrator for the city’s building
department. “Sometimes it’s not that easy.”
Arcadia is on track to bring in record revenue this year. In the fiscal year
ended in June, fees from building permits and development reached $7.9
million, a 72 percent increase from the previous year. Its quiet streets are
busy with gardeners blowing leaves and laborers laying roofs. This summer,
the high school updated its gym and cafeteria. For a generation of older
homeowners, the boom has created one hell of a nest egg. The Great Recession
hit many retirees hard, but now they’ve sold and moved to cheaper places a
few miles away. As Smith, the contractor, says, “They still live close,
but they’ve got 2 million bucks in their bank account.”
With so many homes vacant and language barriers prevalent, distrust is
building. There are strange rumors—local officials on the take; bridal
studios as fronts for massage parlors—and stranger truths. Just steps from
the Arcadia police station, a local TV news reporter uncovered a hotel being
used for birth tourism. A member of one homeowners association says a
developer told the local board at various meetings that three separate homes
he was building were all for his own family. When the board called him on
it, he said his wife couldn’t decide which one she wanted.
“The growth we’re experiencing isn’t typical,” Kasama says. “It’s not
like we have new subdivisions. It’s the houses that are growing.” The city
’s homeowners associations can do only so much—three years ago, the city
changed a regulation that limits their ability to cap the size of houses.
Neighborhood disputes are getting intense. Dong Chang, a local dermatologist
who told the Rotary Club that he left Taiwan in the early 1970s with “two
bags of rice and a frying pan,” is suing the developer building a mansion
next door for cutting down an old oak tree on his property. He’s seeking
about $280,000, saying the harm was “intentional, fraudulent, oppressive,
malicious, and despicably done.”
A red sign reading “Cannon against dogs” hangs from one of two replica
cannons a developer installed pointing to his neighbor across the street
Courtesy City of Arcadia
A red sign reading “Cannon against dogs” hangs from one of two replica
cannons a developer installed pointing to his neighbor across the street
Then there’s the cannon incident. That battle went down on West Las Flores
Avenue, on a block with a mix of older homes and newer construction,
including a house owned by David Tran, the Huy Fong sriracha magnate. A
family moved into a new home in 2008 and flanked the front walkway with two
waist-high lion statues, the “fu dogs” that guard imperial Chinese palaces
. A few years later, a developer named Ricky Tang began building his own
home across the street. Tang didn’t care for the lions, but their owners
refused to remove them. In January 2011, according to city records, Tang
mounted two replica cannons on top of a construction trailer in the front of
his lot, aiming back at the lions. A red sign reading “Cannon against dogs
” in Chinese hung from each cannon. “The neighbor across the street took
offense,” Kasama says. “He felt they looked threatening.” Soon a city-
owned Prius pulled up, lights flashing, with an official entreating Tang to
take down the weaponry. He acquiesced after a month of haggling. Tang didn’
t respond to a request for comment.
Mary Garzio, a widow who’s Tang’s neighbor, calls him “a very nice man.”
She says he’s been wooing her to sell her 73-year-old house for $3 million
in cash. He brings over fruit and says she can live rent-free until she
gets settled elsewhere. “He says, ‘You’re a good neighbor, Mary. I don’t
want you to leave, but I want your home.’ ”
Arcadia’s Chinese buyers may have made their wealth in differentways, but
they face a common problem: getting their cash to America. China controls
the flow of its currency, restricting residents from converting more than $
50,000 in yuan into foreign denominations each year. At that pace it would
take half a lifetime for a couple to buy a $4 million home.
Jeff Needham, a senior vice president at HSBC (HSBC), says it’s most common
for buyers to transfer money from personal or business accounts they
already have in Hong Kong, which doesn’t impose caps. “In most of our
buyer situations, they have funds outside China already that they have
accumulated over years,” he says, adding that the bank verifies the source
of the funds.
It’s trickier for those without accounts in Hong Kong. Chen Ping, a local
broker, says there’s a common workaround. “We call it ‘head-count wiring,
’ ” she says. Buyers line up other people—friends, family, or, if
need be, paid strangers—to each transfer a share. “I once had a customer
who bought a $1.9 million house in Arcadia who said, ‘Not a problem. I have
more than enough head counts,’ ” Chen says. Many buyers have
legitimate ways to wire the funds, says broker Imy Dulake, but “there is no
way we can have this much cash coming in legally.”
When they can’t get enough money through, property records show many get
mortgages to buy the homes, often putting at least 40 percent down. Others
buy with all cash and later take out home-equity loans, freeing up funds for
other investments in the U.S. without going through the rigmarole of
getting money across the Pacific again. Dozens of Chinese homeowners in
Arcadia have loans from HSBC and East West Bancorp (EWBC), both of which
have branches in China. HSBC’s Needham says the bank gives “premier”
clients a discounted rate, and it can underwrite loans in the U.S. based on
international credit scores and assets overseas. East West didn’t respond
to requests for comment.
Even as they fret about their town, longtime Arcadians worry about a sudden
end to the money. What happens if the U.S. limits visas, the Chinese
government clamps down, or the émigrés pick another place to park their
cash? “How high we go, we can’t foresee, because we never know the policy
changes,” real estate agent Seow says. This summer, after an exposé on
China Central Television, the Bank of China ended a government program that
quietly let some customers convert an unlimited amount of yuan into dollars
and transfer it overseas. And President Xi Jinping’s anticorruption
campaign has raised the specter of a larger slowdown. “I was in escrow on a
property before this crackdown, and oh my God, they could not get their
money out” of China, broker Dulake says. The sale fell through.
Stig Hedlund lives on the block with the cannons, in a house built in 1937
by his grandfather, a civil engineer who laid out many of the city’s roads
when everything was still alfalfa fields. Now Hedlund is wondering if he
should leave. He’s received nice offers for his house, like when a broker
and a couple drove up his driveway unannounced in a black Mercedes one
Sunday morning; the broker knocked on the front door, saying the couple
wanted to buy his home. He’d like to wait until his last son graduates from
college, but he fears his “five-year plan” will make him miss the boom.
When he reads news about recent protests in Hong Kong, he wonders how China
’s response will ripple across the mainland. “If a communist government
starts putting the kibosh, isn’t it more incentive to get money out of the
country?” he asks. Or would a crackdown mean he blows his chance to sell?
It’s a question central to Arcadia’s gardeners and construction workers,
the car salesmen and the boba tea makers, who all rely on the money surging
out of China. For now, Hedlund figures he can wait a little longer. He hears
Ornelas just brokered a sale down the street for $2.8 million. | s*******d
发帖数: 17566 | 2 给个摘要
★ 发自iPhone App: ChineseWeb 7.7
【在 d**********l 的大作中提到】
: 一个朋友转发的，写得很有意思，大家看看 :)
: 评论也很有意思。
: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-15/chinese-home-bu
: Why Are Chinese Millionaires Buying Mansions in an L.A. Suburb?
: By Karen Weise October 15, 2014
:
: Why Are Chinese Millionaires Buying Mansions in an L.A. Suburb?
: Photograph by Damon Casarez for Bloomberg Businessweek
: “Oh, hey! How ya’ doin’?” Raleigh Ornelas hollers, leaning out the
: window of his spotless white pickup truck. He’s recognized the man across
| l*****r
发帖数: 15615 | 3 同求。
【在 s*******d 的大作中提到】
: 给个摘要
:
: ★ 发自iPhone App: ChineseWeb 7.7
| Y***r
发帖数: 15270 | 4 co铜球
【在 l*****r 的大作中提到】
: 同求。
| d**********l
发帖数: 538 | 5 中国人傻钱多，大家纷纷涌去Arcadia买房，令Arcadia房价如乘神八一样冲天直上。顺
手举了几个例子，比如华阳集团总裁成清涛成清波兄弟两家的房子，等等。顺带阐述了
Arcadia的历史人口变迁。顺便科普了如何通过香港转现来逃避中国政府的外汇管制。
最后严格遵照新闻稿纪实报道八股文模式提出了一些忧国忧民的话题。等等，等等。 | r*c
发帖数: 16750 | 6 fp看的文章都那么高大上。
穷ds一看那么多鸟文就都闪了
【在 d**********l 的大作中提到】
: 中国人傻钱多，大家纷纷涌去Arcadia买房，令Arcadia房价如乘神八一样冲天直上。顺
: 手举了几个例子，比如华阳集团总裁成清涛成清波兄弟两家的房子，等等。顺带阐述了
: Arcadia的历史人口变迁。顺便科普了如何通过香港转现来逃避中国政府的外汇管制。
: 最后严格遵照新闻稿纪实报道八股文模式提出了一些忧国忧民的话题。等等，等等。
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