‘I feel like I've been tricked’: Some property buyers in China’s Tianjin have been waiting 8 years for their homes

cnbc.com:

BEIJING — A group of around 1,500 homebuyers in the Chinese city of Tianjin, near Beijing, have yet to see — let alone move into to — the apartments they said they paid for about eight years ago.

As is common in China, the apartment complex in Tianjin sold the units before they were completed. The promise was that they would be ready by 2019, but the majority are still unfinished, according to five of the homebuyers, who spoke to CNBC via telephone but requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. The buyers are a mix of people who paid in full upfront but also in smaller installments. Their concerns are just one example of the wider challenges that persist in pockets of China's property sector.

Following early efforts to recoup their money or to garner information about their property purchases, a few buyers said police visited their homes, sometimes in the middle of the night.

«I feel like I've been tricked this whole time,» one buyer said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.

«My only request is that I can return the house and get my money back,» the buyer said. «Even if I am able to get the house, I will feel bad.»

Some buyers said they had bought the apartments as a place for their parents to retire, or for their children to attend school nearby. In the eight years of waiting to move in, one buyer said one of their parents had died while waiting for the new home, and another said their child had grown up and found another school instead.

«I think it's just another reflection of how deep the troubles are for the real estate developers,» Dan Wang, chief economist at Hang Seng Bank (China), told CNBC.

«What's happened in Tianjin is not a unique phenomenon,» she said. «I think there should be more of those cases coming out