What is your experiences in the process?

Which pitfalls to be aware off?

I have got offers for my apartment from real estate agent and I have met couple of buyers. Real estate agent is using standard contract template for selling second hand apartment. It looks just normal Chinese contract.

When must the seller hand over the ownership license?

One regulation I have found: If buyer cancels he must pay totally two times the first deposit. Maximum for the deposit seems to be 50kRMB ( not sure though about this limit ) so 100kRMB is the compensation for the cancellation. Quite low compared to the apartment prices.

Hi, Laowaiguoren

As to the deposit, it works this way: generally the buyer will pay a sum of money to the agent as "earnest money" and the agent presents the money together with major terms of the sale agreed already by buyer to you; if you agree on those major terms and sign it, such earnest money will automatically turn into "deposit". This mechanism has almost became standard clauses in practice.

When deposit takes effect, the buyer paying deposit will forfeit such deposit if he defaults by withdrawing from the deal, and the seller receiving deposit will return two times the deposit to buyer if he so defaults.

A deposit can be up to 20% of the total price.

However, courts in Shanghai, esp Pudong may not enforce such deposit rules. To make sure the deposit bites, you'd better separately sign an agreement on such deposit.

Good luck... selling an apartment takes forever and involves running around from one office to another and back again, then again, then again etc and there's lots of waiting at and in between each step. I hope you aren't thinking of repatriating the capital. Thats a whole process in itself. The agent basically handled the whole thing but I had to be there at each step to occasionally sign something. It seemed to me that I needn't have been there for most of the process but... well, you have to at least pretend to oversee everything don't you. The whole thing took months. Awful.

Hi, Robnot, you are definitely correct.

For most people, even Chinese people, selliing and buying processes are very complicated esp when the target property has an unpaid mortgage loan over it.

Well, one way to avoid such nuisance of runnaround and waiting in long que is to authorize your attorney to do the all this work, of couse, at cost of money. Such POA shall have to be notarized before a Chinese notary public.