A Chinese man who paid for a flat on the 34th floor of a building has spent over a decade locked in a financial nightmare after discovering the building only had 32 floors.
And, making the matters worse, the developer, having pocketed most of his money, has since gone silent, the South China Morning Post reported.
Shen, a resident of Shaanxi province in northwestern China, purchased a 90-square-metre unit in a new residential development near Xian in 2013, paying 2,646 yuan per square metre, roughly one-third of the prevailing market rate.
The low price came with a catch: the property carried limited property rights, an informal term for housing built illegally on collectively owned rural land that cannot be resold and carries no legal protection.
Buyers purchase such units knowing the risks, primarily because they are cheap.
Shen paid an initial down payment of 117,700 yuan (approximately Rs 14 lakh) to the developer, who told him the necessary certificates would be arranged later, an assurance that, by design, could never be fulfilled, as illegal properties are ineligible for the full set of required certificates.
The developer promised delivery by 2015.
When Shen returned to check on the property, the building was incomplete. By 2017, the developer declared it finished and demanded the outstanding payment, but told him months later that the floor he had purchased did not exist. The building, they said, only went up to the 32nd floor.
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An offer of a 32nd-floor unit fell through, and when Shen sought a refund, the developer claimed insolvency. Partial refunds trickled in — 20,000 yuan in 2020 and 50,000 yuan in 2022 — before the developer stopped responding entirely.
Shen pursued arbitration, winning an order for the remaining 47,700 yuan plus interest, but as of May this year, the money had not arrived.
A court subsequently issued a consumption restriction order against the developer, who was found to have no registered savings or assets.
The case has drawn significant attention on Chinese social media, where it has reignited debate about the risks of grey-market housing.
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"Flats with limited property rights are cheap, but have many problems. The man is unlucky but there is no way to help him," one user commented.
Another offered a bleaker rationale for why people buy such properties regardless: "I would need to spend the same amount of money on renting a flat, and will still not own my flat in a decade."
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