# Urban China's empty homes

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://paragraph.com/@brandondonnelly), 2021-10-04

china, china-evergrande-group, china-gdp, construction, development, new-housing, overbuilding, real-estate, wall-street-journal

---

![](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/6e3bd4df1b151bd05528e46ef6d37161.png)

China Evergrande Group has been in the news lately for being one of [the most indebted property companies in the world](https://www.wsj.com/articles/evergrande-china-crisis-11632330764). The company is now looking to [raise some $5 billion](https://www.reuters.com/business/china-evergrande-share-trading-halted-hong-kong-2021-10-04/) by selling a stake in one of its business lines. That seems like a lot of money, but apparently it has upwards of $300 billion in liabilities. As I was reading about the company ([in this WSJ article](https://www.wsj.com/articles/evergrande-china-crisis-11632330764)) I was surprised by some other stats about China's housing market. According to some sources, nearly a third of the country's GDP can now be tied back to real estate-related activities (see above chart). On top of this, about 21% of homes in urban China were thought to be vacant as of 2017. This equated to about 65 million empty homes. I don't know what the exact numbers look like today, but these are staggering figures that speak to overbuilding.

_Chart: WSJ_

---

*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://paragraph.com/@brandondonnelly/urban-chinas-empty-homes)*