When Beijing introduced price caps for almost two-thirds of apartments in late 2016 as part of a programme to provide homes for millions of middle-class citizens to buy, an array of cheap condominiums began springing up on the city's outskirts.It's an awkward reality confronting authorities in the nation's sprawling capital, which introduced the stringent housing curbs to quash prices that had shot up almost 30% in the 12 months through September 2016.
The limited-price policy was also the first time in the nation's 30-year housing market history that the authorities sought to control the cost of apartments before they had even been built. When the first condominiums under the programme started to come to market in mid-2018, some project owners didn't even bother with showrooms, believing demand would be so strong, the apartments would sell themselves.