The recent topic of whether the real estate market should be rescued has been hotly debated on Toutiao. At the invitation of Toutiao Finance, let's continue the stream of consciousness and share my views with everyone.

As for the decision to buy a house, everyone must not listen to my one-sided words. It is necessary to look at various opinions and analyze specific issues specifically. Moreover, a situation that has occurred worldwide is that the real estate of some countries is not good, but some areas are still rising against the trend, so do not try to generalize from the whole.

First, I have to tell everyone what it would be like if the real estate industry is not good.

Some friends may immediately think of an apocalyptic scene, where houses are given away for free and no one wants them, real estate companies go bankrupt, and the market is in a depression.

In reality, this situation is almost impossible. In reality, what usually happens is that real estate companies offer discounts and promotions, and the more marginal the city, the greater the discount. Until the high-profit industry gradually becomes a low-profit industry. Because real estate companies can't make much money, a large number of practitioners begin to change careers.

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You may say, isn't this what has been happening in recent years?

Yes, in recent years, the country has been "abandoning quantity to protect price", that is, in many cities, such as Huizhou, the government, in order to protect the land price, does not allow real estate merchants to sell at a lower price. The inevitable result of high-priced operation is that the transaction volume cannot go up.

Superimposed with the "three red lines", a large number of real estate companies have gone bankrupt. In this sense, the real estate industry has been on a downward trend for several years.

Now it's just at a critical point, that is, whether the government agrees to allow real estate companies to have floating house prices.

I estimate that the final result must be floating house prices, because if the house price is not reduced, the transaction volume will be problematic, and without transaction volume, it will eventually be a dead end. So it can only be to relax control and let real estate merchants adjust prices according to the actual situation, just like selling watermelons.Once dynamic pricing adjustment begins, it doesn't plummet instantly. The real-world operation often resembles the pattern of "K-lines." It first drops a bit, and everyone rushes in to buy, forming the initial tier of housing prices.

However, for many places, the number of young people is decreasing. After a while, new houses will be on sale again, but the purchasing power is insufficient, leading to a further drop. Then, similar to stocks, it continues to fall in the long term.

Moreover, over time, people will gradually accept this change, just like when you buy a computer or a car, you don't expect it to appreciate in value when you want to sell it a few years later.

You might say, "But some cars do appreciate in value." Yes, but those cars often represent scarcity and are already expensive. That is to say, a very small number of houses can indeed maintain their prices, but these houses are very expensive and have nothing to do with most people. It's like the appreciation prospects of houses in Xicheng District, Beijing, are good, but most people have little to do with it.

Without any surprises, people will gradually accept a reality that most real estate will lose its financial attributes and no longer appreciate in value. Buying a house is like buying a car; it depreciates once you buy it. In this case, people will no longer hoard, have you ever seen anyone hoarding TVs?

Of course, not hoarding doesn't mean there won't be improvements. After all, TVs will be replaced with larger ones after a few years. In this sense, the real estate market will continue to weaken but won't die.

Some people will also pursue those very expensive and value-preserving houses, but the cost is that those houses are incredibly expensive, and the key is that the maintenance cost is very high. Property fees may be higher than the salaries of many ordinary people. This is not an exaggeration. In many flat houses in Beijing, which are not particularly outrageous luxury houses, the annual community property fees, parking management fees, and energy fees (many good communities have constant temperature systems, no need for air conditioning in summer, no heating in winter, but the whole year is at a constant temperature), add up to 70,000 to 80,000 yuan a year. The community green space is like a park, trying to attract other wealthy people to buy, everything is good, the only problem is that it's incredibly expensive.

That is to say, the real estate industry will not be viable in the future, not because the industry is completely gone, but people will still buy houses, just not as crazy as in the past few years. After the real estate industry has shrunk significantly, it will become like the color TV industry, with a large scale, but it won't become the only core of the entire social economy.

Now think about it, the saying "houses are for living in, not for speculation" makes a lot of sense.

In reality, most people who "flip houses" don't really want to speculate, but the unilateral growth of the real estate market over the past few decades has led many people to have the obsession that "house prices will always rise." As a result, they buy houses whenever they have money. In this situation, many wealthy people hoard houses on a large scale. When those people hoard, they don't even think about what these houses will be used for in the future, they just want to hoard them, buy them with money, and mortgage them to continue buying.So, the demand for housing has always exceeded supply, and when supply can't meet demand, prices go up, further proving that housing is indeed the most value-preserving investment.

But why have people started to doubt the value preservation of housing in recent years? Because after 2017, the state has been exerting pressure on housing prices from the perspective of loans. In most areas, housing prices not only did not rise but even fell, thus shaking this concept.

To add a point, real estate is mainly a "credit" issue. If banks do not lend money indiscriminately, the real estate market will immediately be affected. This is also why in every real estate regulation, the banks are the main target, such as the "recognize both house and loan" policy, which takes immediate effect.

In the future, if housing becomes a normal consumer product like cars, most people will no longer hoard it. In reality, the housing prices in Beijing have been falling in the past two years, leading to a surge in the number of listings this year.

It's not only in Beijing that the number of listings has surged, but also nationwide. Those who have hoarded many houses finally feel that if they don't sell now, it will be too late.

Why does the state want to suppress it? It's obvious. If prices continue to rise, it will send the wrong signal to the market. Everyone will stop consuming and focus on buying houses. The scale of industries related to real estate will grow larger and larger, while other industries will struggle. The key is that the loans in the real estate industry are increasing, and the risks are also skyrocketing. Until one day, when real estate cannot withstand the economic laws and turns downward, the wealth of the whole society will burst into a gorgeous fireworks display, and the banks will also collapse.

That is to say, in the past six years, the government has exerted pressure on housing prices, which has made many people who hoarded houses lose heart and start to sell their houses. Their behavior has further led to the housing prices in various places being half-dead in recent years. However, objectively speaking, banks are much safer now. The loans made in recent years have the ability to be repaid. Of course, this repayment ability means that they have a regular job. If the job is gone, the repayment ability will also be in trouble.

In this sense, it may not necessarily be that the country does not want to save housing prices, but whether it can or not. If we continue to let the people leverage to save real estate, the risk will be transferred to the banks. At that time, it may be impossible to save both real estate and banks. So I tend to think that in the future, the country will continue to implement the "housing for living, not for speculation" policy, neither suppressing nor saving real estate, and let it take its course.

Speaking of which, some people ask, if Chinese people do not buy houses, where will the money of the common people go?

I have always been puzzled by these people. Do they really lack common sense in life? When the common people have money, don't they know where to spend it? How many times do they go to a restaurant in a month? How many times do they take their children out to play each year? Do they have a Switch? Have they bought various brand-name clothes? What about PS5? Why not give an adult child a car like American parents? Have they tried staying in a five-star hotel? Have they taken a plane?Anyway, before I graduated from university, apart from dining out, I hadn't done anything else.

And everyone knows, there might only be a term called "original cut steak" in China. Because generally speaking, a steak is just a steak, how can there be "original cut or not"? Indeed, there is. Many merchants mix duck meat with silicone to create composite steaks. Why is there such a thing? It's cheap. Go and see, those that are obviously abnormally cheap are often the best-selling, and most likely it's this kind.

Why do I mention this? Because last year, the company recruited a new employee who, after receiving his salary, went to eat steak at that expensive Western restaurant outside the company and realized that he had been eating composite steaks all along.

His conditions are not very good, but they are definitely not bad in China. Think about how many people in China have never actually eaten a real steak.

So, the question of "where Chinese people spend their money" is very clear: spend it, improve your own living standards, improve the standards of your family, experience the world, and don't find out before you die that you've come to this world in vain and haven't experienced anything.

Moreover, money is actually a vote.

Every penny you spend is a vote for the world. In the past few years, Chinese people have been buying houses vigorously, giving rise to the world's largest real estate industry.

The world's otaku have been voting with money, giving rise to NVIDIA's trillion-dollar market value. I know NVIDIA recently passed the trillion-dollar mark because of AI, but its early R&D investment was almost entirely dependent on games.

Before the training industry was hit, parents were crazy about spending money, and they created a huge shadow education system outside of school. To add one more sentence, many people have a lot of complaints about the country hitting this extracurricular training, I think there is no problem at all, and I will open a special article to talk to everyone in the future.

In the future, you can definitely spend money on other things, such as investing in the catering industry and eating more good food.Either play games seriously and support our gaming industry. When it comes to games, many people's first reaction is that indulging in games leads to a loss of ambition, but in fact, it is not the case.

A trend in social development is that "working hours are getting less and less, while gaming and socializing time is getting more and more," and an even bigger trend is that "spending less and less time in reality and more and more time in the virtual world."

In fact, "playing virtually" has always been a noble behavior. In ancient times, only nobles and wealthy people engaged in entertainment activities like "playing musical instruments, playing chess, calligraphy, and painting," which were not very practical. The entertainment for the poor was to watch a few performances a year, and even when someone in the village died, it was an opportunity for entertainment for the villagers, who would all put down their work and go to watch.

As society develops, the threshold for these entertainment activities is getting lower and is becoming more accessible to the lower classes.

The same principle can also be applied to tourism. In the future, there will be more and more cities like Zibo. When people go out to play, they no longer have to worry about being cheated.

We always talk about industrial upgrading, and upgrading is not just about chips, but also in many other fields. For example, spending a small amount of money can experience high-quality tourism. Or from never having a massage, now going once a week. Money invested in these fields will naturally create more job opportunities.

Finally, there is the topic that has been talked about to death: buying a house is a one-time consumption, after all, no one will research and develop cement and the like. But if you buy a car or a camera, these manufacturers can use the profits to continue research and development and hire more people. These industries are evolving, and the more people spend in these industries, the more labor they absorb, and the more job opportunities they can provide.

Nowadays, most local governments in China are used to making quick money from real estate and are too lazy to carefully study other ways of making money. As real estate is no longer viable, these issues will have to be studied in the future. Maybe they will take some practical actions like the Zibo government, at least to completely ban the cheating and various unscrupulous merchants in various places, which is also a kind of industrial upgrading.

Epilogue:

If there is a reason why other industries cannot compare with real estate, the biggest problem is that the money-printing ability of real estate is too strong. You would borrow money for thirty years to buy a house, but you would not borrow money for 30 years to travel, right? Banks would not lend you that much either.But there's no way around it, the high-leverage, wild surge model cannot be sustained in the long run. No matter how much you miss that model, it cannot continue.

Just like you may infinitely miss your college days, you cannot stay on campus forever. The real estate boom is a one-way street for all countries. When it reaches a certain level, real estate acts like a booster, pushing the national economy forward for a while, and then it can't push anymore. On one hand, those who should have houses have them, and on the other hand, the high housing prices continue to add leverage, and the risk is outrageous.

Or think about it another way, the essence of real estate is also a mine. When people across the country have some money in their hands and want to live in modern housing, mining their needs to buy houses is like mining. When everyone has bought about the same number of houses, the mine is almost empty.

The next thing is likely to be uncomfortable. Because the essence of real estate is debt. Residents use six wallets to make down payments and borrow debts for thirty years into the future, which has led to the prosperity of the past few years. But debts must be repaid, and anyone with basic life common sense knows that borrowing money to consume is how cool it is, and how painful it is to save money to repay.

But the solution to this pain should not be to borrow more money, right?

In the future, it can only be to get rid of the dependence on real estate. This is not a matter of whether you want to or not, everyone does not want to, but it is really not possible to dig it out, what's the use of not wanting to?

Then delve into the real needs of residents. Cities with conditions to develop high-tech industries should develop high-tech industries well, and those without conditions should see if they can develop tourism. If even tourism can't be developed, then less trouble is also a kind of maturity. Like cities and people, if you can't do it, less trouble is also a kind of maturity, not losing is making a profit.

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