I. When a pie in the sky drops on your head, the first feeling is pain.
My first experience buying a house was in 1999, and at that time, I knew nothing about it. Looking back now, I realize how foolish and amusing it was.
The reason was quite simple: our workplace had stopped allocating housing, and I wanted to switch to a bigger house. The idea of buying a house started to grow on me. Moreover, I read in the newspaper that housing prices were rising all over the country, especially in coastal areas like Shenzhen, where the housing prices seemed exorbitant —— from the perspective of low-income earners in underdeveloped regions like mine. It was also rumored that houses in Changsha were more expensive than in Wuhan, so I believed that buying a house would not be a bad deal. I thought, in developed countries, buying a house is a lifelong matter for ordinary people, which shows that houses will surely become so expensive that they are hard to buy in the future. How could the houses in Wuhan be worse than those in Changsha? That doesn't make sense. With such a big gap between Wuhan's housing prices and the national average, it's inevitable that they will rise. Just look at the United States, where common people also have to pay off their home loans for a lifetime. Therefore, we will surely follow their steps. When China develops as much as the United States and Wuhan develops as much as the coastal areas, how could the housing prices not be the same as in the coastal areas? At that time, with my current income, I wouldn't be able to afford a house.
Besides, there was no fallback option of welfare housing. If I wanted to live in a bigger house, I had to act fast.
After discussing it with my wife, she agreed with me. Thus, we began looking for houses.
Nowadays, people often say that the housing prices back then were low, but that's because people are comparing today's income with yesterday's housing prices. Of course, it seems low. In my opinion, if we compare housing prices with income, housing prices have never been low. I would say that today, it might even be better than back then.
Let me give you two personal examples.