Property map reveals agony of home buyers

BEIJING - An average wage earner has to save for 13 years just to raise the down payment for a small flat in Beijing -- if he or she can live on thin air.

The Chinese capital is one of nine places that are marked as "red zones" in an unofficial map indicating how much home buyers suffer in different parts of the country.

In the red zones, home buyers have to scrape together every single cent they earn for at least nine years -- without spending anything even on food -- to cover the down payment for a home no bigger than 80 square meters in floor space.

The down payment makes up an average 30 percent of the home price.

According to this "map," which has become popular on the web since Friday, home buyers in Beijing are the third most miserable groups after those in Hong Kong and Macao, where ordinary wage earners have to save 19 and 14 years respectively for the down payment.

Other Chinese cities that are printed red on the map include Xiamen, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Taipei.

It is unclear who drew the "map of Chinese home buyers' agonies." But a note at the bottom of the map says the different degrees of agony were calculated on the basis of average income levels released by the National Bureau of Statistics, and average home prices collected from real estate markets in the different cities.

The calculations have also triggered complaints from web users, who claim their incomes are actually below the average level, while the actual home prices are even higher than what the map suggests.

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