Not true, for example, there has been a housing glut in most big Chinese cities recently, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou etc, and rents in most big cities like Wuhan, Chongqing, Chengdu etc are pretty low, which means that the supply of new housing there is robust.
I haven't been looking closely at housing costs in China for seven years. There are temporary rises and falls. If new housing prices are down a little bit, that's down from a long-term upward trend that existed all the years I lived there. However, it's not the same as to say prices are actually
low, implying they are low in comparison to one's salary & purchasing power. My experience was that Chinese like to spend about 1/4 of their gross income on housing compared to Americans for whom it was around 1/3.
Can you actually make the case that the Chinese housing and rental prices are low? Or are they just lower than last year?
This short video has no details, like how many square meters, how old the building is, what city he's in, and how far out he is from the city center.
$160 USD/month is about 1000 RMB, which was what I might have paid in the outskirts of Guangzhou in 2011 for something that size, I'm guessing 30 square meters. If your job is not too far from your apartment and your life works living on the edges of the city, then this might be for you. If you have to spend a couple of hours a day on packed subway trains, you won't make it.
That looks like a reasonably nice Chinese apartment. It's small, but livable for one person who doesn't want to entertain. Notice the burglar bars everywhere, so it could be Guangzhou or really anywhere in Guangdong.
The view looks nice from the window and I lived in apartment complexes like that in Guangzhou, but when you walk outside you'll find many problems. If the pool is swimmable, and often they're not, it's expensive, like 25 RMB per time and the yearly plan is not cheap either.
It would be exceptionally rare if the landscaping in the common area was arranged in a way so that you could enjoy being there. I never saw an example of that (all my time was in Guangzhou and Shenzhen), whereas every place I or friends lived had common areas that were literally repulsive and you would never do anything but walk through them as quickly as possible in order to get inside your apartment and away from the other people, noise, pollution and smell.
Anecdotal, but one of my Chinese friends moved from Guangzhou to Beijing around 2010 in order to go to graduate school and he had to take a really shitty shared apartment, then one day it caught fire and he was burned to death while showering. The kinds of places where most working-class Chinese rent are not in any of these "Isn't China great?" promotional type videos that foreigners put on youtube, who easily earn 3-5x what a local degreed professional makes while working 50% of their hours, or less.
A little more than half of the apartments I lived in flooded because of bad pipes and that problem was common to everyone I knew, as well as other problems. Chinese doors always have problems and I knew a few foreigners who got locked inside their apartments, in the bathroom or bedroom because the door handles failed. A buddy was locked inside his bedroom and his phone was in the living room, so after hours of waiting, he had to spider man into the bathroom and then call for help.
When Chinese people buy an apartment/condo, they almost always gut the entire place because they don't trust the materials used in the previous decoration, such as cabinets, wall facades, paint, etc., which were likely extremely toxic and/or covered in cooking oil residue, so they redo it all.
One of the main sources of noise living in a Chinese house/apartment/condo is the continual demolition of apartments around you being redecorated. Jackhammers go almost non-stop from 6AM - midnight somewhere close enough in your building to be disturbing for several weeks, then pause for a week or two, and then return; the pattern is then repeated until you move. It's one of the perennial complaints of foreigners, who find it maddening because it's impossible to get used to the noise however, Chinese are inured to many of these sensory phenomenon.
If there are no jackhammers, unless you're more than 20 stories up, which was the only time I escaped this problem, Chinese people walking through the courtyard will make enough noise to disturb or wake you at all hours if your windows are open. You might not think two men walking together nine floors down at 3 AM would need to speak to each other at 110 dB, and you would be wrong.
Nice looking apartment near the lake. 3000 RMB for that size and location is much cheaper than what I would have paid in Guangzhou, which doesn't have a central lake, but for a desirable location it would have been at least twice that. Not sure how new her building is and her amenities, but I could have paid 6000-8000 RMB/month for a newer place that size in Guanghzou in 2018 in the best parts of town.
Now for the tough love. She said the area where she lives around the lake is "clean and quiet." Forgive me, but she is not speaking the truth and I can guess the reason: she's pregnant and wants to see the cup half full, which is understandable.
The fact is that there is nowhere in mainland China with apartment complexes that is clean and quiet. It does not exist. China is extremely dirty from the pollution and noisy from the construction, and also from the Chinese people themselves, who are dirty and noisy. She is coping hard.
