From NetEast: June 27th 5:30 am Shanghai Minhang district a 13 story building in “Lotus River Garden” Residential collapsed, resulting one death. The building was unoccupied and still under construction.

An in-depth back-and-forth on Chinese real estate between a foreign investor and an American academic teaching in Beijing.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China is to crack down on "blindly" using foreign architects to design major public buildings as part of a drive to stifle costly architectural extravanganzas, state media reported on Saturday.

Zhang Xin and her husband are the most familiar faces of a real estate boom in China. That doesn't make them a popular couple.

Part 2 of this series on Private Equity in China, posted on November 3, described how a newly-created Chinese private equity firm, majority-owned by a large state-owned bank, had raised funds from state-owned financial institutions and had then made its first investment in a state-owned company in Tianjin. I thought this was pretty interesting because it showed how fast the Chinese have caught on to the private equity game and how determined they now are to make it a purely Chinese affair—at least as far as state-owned companies and assets are concerned.

Interesting map that plots the cost of Shanghai Real Estate in accordance to it's proximity to the Metro stations.

The closer you are to the Metro - the more your apartment is worth.

1) If ya buy an apartment as an individuul, ya gotta live in it. In nuther wurds, you’re one person. You being one human (occupying one body with two eyes, a nose and a genitalia) can bye one China apartment fur personal use. And god damnit, you better had up an lived there! Cus the rulez say you cain’t own property where ur not registered (got some kind a paperwork crap) to live....

“I think that certain artists whose prices have been unhealthily pushed in the last years, will vanish from the market." ... "The Asian artists do not suffer from being a niche art, but suffer due to the circumstances that the market is not as developed as in Europe."... "Foreign buyers aren’t buying, or even worse, have bought paintings and aren’t paying their bills"

Yesterday afternoon in Lushun, a suburb of Dalian, at around 2.30 in the afternoon an apartment building suffered what's thought to be a gas explosion, blowing away the top two floors. Details, and some good background on mid 90s apartment buildings in China.