BEIJING: Four six-square meter apartments sold this weekend in Shenzhen made a splash in the media, but the sales were later declared illegal due to unauthorised modifications made to the properties.
Nicknamed “pigeon holes”, these mini studios are located in a 15-storey building called Qiaocheng Shangyu, which offers 11 apartments with sizes ranging from 5.73sq m to 7.48sq m, and 160 other units of 35sq m to 45sq m.
But the Urban Planning, Land and Resources Commission in the city’s Nanshan district on Monday said the actual size of these four apartments ranged from 12sq m to 20sq m after illegal changes were made to public shared areas.
The district’s supervisory bureau of land planning on Monday forced the managers of the property company to demolish the illegal constructions, cancel the four trading contracts, and suspend all sales activities.
Though the size of these apartments is extremely limited, they were fully furnished as a complete home with kitchen, bathroom, one folding bed and three windows.
Besides their size, another attraction was their location – just a street away from the Shenzhen High-Tech Industrial Park, which hosts most of the city’s technology companies, in Nanshan, the city’s most expensive residential district.
These mini homes were sold at a fixed price of 880,000 yuan (RM544,000), much more affordable than normal-sized homes in the same district, which retail for millions or even tens of millions yuan.
Song Ding, director of the Tourism and Real Estate Industry Research Center at China Development Institute, a Shenzhen-based think tank, said the existence of such tiny apartments is a necessary outcome of Shenzhen’s rocketing home prices. — China Daily/Asia News Network
