Al Jazeera – Agencies:
Chinese companies working in the real estate sector announced that they would accept the sale of their homes in the barter system for food instead of money, in an effort to attract buyers. Over the past months, companies have published promotional advertisements that talk regarding sales deals in a way that allows citizens to buy new homes in return for paying home down payments by supplying agricultural products, including peaches, watermelons and garlic. Despite this, some companies withdrew those exceptional offers, and home sales in China recorded a decline for 11 consecutive months, which caused major companies operating in the sector to default on their debts this week.
A real estate company in the eastern city of Wuxi said it would allow peaches to be accepted for up to $28 in down payment on homes. Another company in neighboring Nanjing added that it would accept the supply of 5,000 kilograms of watermelons from farmers, with a value equivalent to 100,000 yuan, which is more than the price offered in the local markets. Despite this, companies suspended those promotions, which were supposed to continue until next Friday, according to the official “Global Times” newspaper. “We have been asked to delete all promotional posts on social media platforms,” the newspaper said, quoting a representative of one of the companies as saying, without elaborating further. In May, Central China Real Estate launched a 16-day campaign to accept garlic as a down payment on the price of a home in China’s Qi Province, a major garlic-growing region. “We help farmers with love and make it easier for them to buy homes,” the company said in a post on the Chinese WeChat platform. Under the deal, the price of a weight of garlic, equivalent to regarding 600 grams, is set at five Chinese yuan, regarding 3 times its market price, and the company said that it accepted 860,000 weights of garlic in deals to sell 30 homes. Despite this, the company has since deleted an announcement of a similar sale in exchange for wheat, which was launched on WeChat last month.
Experts said the deals are a way for companies to get around local authority rules to limit the amount of discounts they are allowed to offer. Official figures for May show that residential property sales in China fell 41.7 percent from a year earlier, the eleventh consecutive month of decline.
