Text丨Gao Huiping.
Edit丨When Zhao Fangzi's domestic real estate market was relatively sluggish, a group of people who were doing real estate in Africa were active on social **, and they said that there were infinite possibilities and opportunities for real estate in Africa at present.
In Africa, where a single plot of land is limited, usually no more than 2 acres, or the size of a standard football field, it is difficult for large companies to take a fancy to the business, leaving room for reckless individual investors.
The first group of entrepreneurs to go to Africa to dig real estate have already made a name for themselves. Behind the success story is the disappearing blue ocean and the unfathomable African market. But there are always Chinese businessmen who are unwilling to conquer this African continent full of opportunities and imagination.
In Kenya, East Africa, more than 100 Chinese real estate developers have gathered here. In 2018, at the age of 35, Andy boarded a flight abroad for the first time in his life, carrying only a cabin suitcase containing daily medicines and a few summer clothes. As a gold digger who was about to go to sea, he felt that he didn't need to bring much with him, except for the desire and courage to make money.
The destination of the flight was East Africa's economic leader Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. At that time, Andy had just experienced a career waterloo in China and was determined to come to Africa to fight a turnaround. When the plane landed, I saw that most of the houses on both sides of the road were only two or three stories high, about the same as the small town in China at that time. Andy immediately recognized the opportunity: real estate in Africa is indeed two or three decades behind the rest of the country.
In a blue ocean of the African real estate market,Chinese businessmen are expected to replicate the magnificence of China's real estate in the past two decades – something that most Chinese entrepreneurs looking forward to in Africa. In business, this is known as the time machine effect: transplanting a successfully proven business model into an untapped market where there is demand.
Starting from the abolition of welfare housing in 1998, China's real estate has gone through a complete marketization road in the past 20 years. In 2007, Andy entered the industry, curbing the rapid housing price ** is still the primary goal**, a large number of real estate companies poured into the campus recruitment, originally studied logistics He also plunged into this sunrise industry and became a real estate marketing planner.
It was the first age of real estate. Taking advantage of the times, Andy became the company's project master in the third year of employment. He also dreamed of seizing his own opportunities - in 2014, he co-founded a marketing company with his classmates to independently sell a property in Guizhou, but it ended in failure: in those two years, too many houses appeared on the market, and the market trend had already quietly changed. By 2016, Andy's project was selling slowly.
In the end, the major shareholder's funds were broken, and the matter was irreparable. Andy disbanded the sales team, and hundreds of thousands of investments were also wasted.
In 2018, when an acquaintance threw an olive branch and invited Andy to go to Kenya to do real estate, he had already taken a year off. With little hesitation, Andy agreed.
The acquaintance is his current boss, who has been engaged in real estate development in Kenya for 10 years. The boss said very simply, and there are two points to summarize: first, risks and opportunities coexist, but opportunities outweigh risks; Second, the return on investment is better than that in China, even for ordinary employees, the salary of the same position is 30%-50% higher than that in China.
Andy calculated the future in his mind: staying in China, the era of real estate has passed, and the annual salary of a real estate planner is only two or three hundred thousand yuan; But in Africa, 10 million yuan can develop a project, hundreds of thousands of yuan can be invested in shares, investment) income may be 10 times that of China.
He also believes that only in Africa can he have the opportunity to develop projects independently, as Deng Changwu is a benchmark for local Chinese developers, whose trajectory in the first half of his life closely overlaps with Andy's: a college student who also came out of a small mountain village in Sichuan Province and encountered a career bottleneck when he reached middle age. But unlike Andy, in the 2000s, Deng Changwu became one of the first Chinese businessmen to develop real estate business in Africa, and at the age of 40, he was an ordinary manager of the company, but the gold rush in Africa completely changed his fate: 20 years later, he became an important figure in living in a villa, marrying a local wife, sending his daughter to study in Britain and the United States, and promoting exchanges between China and Kenya.
Such success stories inspire many Chinese who come to Africa to start their own businesses. In the non-entrepreneurial Chinese circle, Deng Changwu is a role of "passing on the help" - over the years, he has brought no less than 50 Chinese individual developers, through "relatives with relatives" and friends with friends, more and more Chinese have gathered in Kenya.
Not everyone noticedWhen Mr. Deng entered Africa, there were only two or three Chinese developers on the market: because of the limited size of a single plot of land in Africa, which is usually no more than 2 acres, or the size of a standard football field, it was difficult for large Chinese companies to take a fancy to the business. This leaves room for reckless individual investors. Back then, with the purchase of 1Seventy or eighty houses built on 2 acres (less than 5,000 square meters) of land, Deng Changwu successfully earned the first pot of gold.
But today, according to Deng Changwu's statistics, there are now more than 100 Chinese real estate developers in Kenya. The gradual development and evolution of the market has brought higher complexity to the operation, but when entrepreneurs first set foot on this land, they were full of dreams of career success and wealth, and they were completely unprepared for all of this.
View of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, from the construction site. The first lesson that interviewee Deng Changwu learned in Africa was to be patient and ready to deal with uncertainty at any time.
The first time I bought land, it didn't go well. It's also a business made of land and reinforced concrete, but in Africa, almost every aspect of real estate is different from that in China.
In China, urban land is owned by the state, and enterprises acquire land through the "bidding, auction and listing" system. But in Africa, where land is privately owned, the usual practice is to go through the transfer procedures through a lawyer appointed by the landlord - at that time, the lawyer hired by Deng was the wife of an acquaintance police officer, who thought he was reliable, but the other party did not show up for an appointment on time, and the transfer was scheduled to be completed in two months, but three months passed without any progress. The formalities were finally completed, and the other party asked for an increase in the lawyer's fee, and she had the final say on how much it would increase.
In a chaotic market, the rules are not yet established, but there are corresponding benefits. In China, the approval process after obtaining land is long and rigorous: everything about the real estate, including the façade, building spacing, floor height, etc., needs to be approved in advance by the planning, land, environmental protection, transportation, fire protection and other departments. In Kenya, however, the procedure is much simpler, with no restrictions except for height indicators in some areas.
In addition to this, the power of human affection also works very well. For the first project developed by Deng Changwu, the relevant departments originally approved the height of the four floors, and he wanted to increase the jump and report it for approval, but the designer's work efficiency was too slow, and the approval was delayed, resulting in the project being reported for illegal construction and forced to stop. Later, Deng Changwu described that a deputy director helped, and then the resumption of work notice was sent.
Compared with important people in the local society such as the deputy director, in a backward country like Africa, sometimes getting along with ordinary people is the key to the success or failure of the project.
Andy's first job in Kenya was as a construction site construction manager. When the project enters the construction stage, the construction team he manages will start operating: under Andy's management, several Chinese are responsible for plumbers, bricks and other links, and each Chinese is in charge of dozens of local workers - in Kenya, a local foreman earns about 600 yuan a month - such a low cost, if managed well, will be the profit of many real estate projects**.
But the dispute almost never ends: neighbors report that the construction site is working overtime to create noise; **The department said that it could not read the documents, and accused the project of illegally arresting the master of the on-site construction; The carpenter took the injury report from three months ago and demanded compensation. These contradictions all end up pointing to the same result – asking for money.
In addition to extortion, local theft is commonplace. EntrepreneursHuang HaijiangAll this is blamed on poverty: in the local area, the monthly salary of an ordinary worker is only two or three hundred yuan, and the goods piled up in the construction warehouse are sometimes worth hundreds of thousands of yuan, which is too big for some African workers. 」For this reason, Andy had to have security guards patrol the construction site every day, search the workers when they got off work, and in addition, security guards as an important position must be guaranteed by someone, and in case of problems, the guarantor also needs to sit together.
Huang Hai once nearly bankrupted his startup after 15 motorcycles were stolen. At that time, he started a business in Nigeria to do distribution, and found a local guarantor to recommend local employees, but the guarantor ran away on a motorcycle with the employees, and he didn't care about calling the police.
This is probably a daily routine for every African construction site. Andy went from being apprehensive in the early stage to gradually becoming more and more strange in the later stage, and like some Chinese construction sites, he simply put the cost of stealing into the budget in advance.
Of course, compared to the unstable political situation, these difficulties are negligible. Even though the political situation in Kenya is stable in Africa, Deng Changwu has experienced two thrilling wars in the past 20 years.
The first occurred in December 2007, when Deng Changwu's first project was about to be topped out, when violent clashes erupted in Kenya over elections. Workers risk their lives to come to work, and these poor families need a salary to make ends meet more than war. With no cash on hand, Deng Changwu managed to get some bread, which was only enough for half a bag per person, and many workers were reluctant to eat it, so they were hungry and took it home for their children.
More than 1,300 Kenyans were killed during the six-week unrest. Deng Changwu saw the cruelty of survival on the African continent: the empty streets were filled with the pungent smell of burning tires, gunshots rang out from time to time, and rocks were thrown on cars. At the risk of danger, Deng Changwu went to the urban cooperative bank, and he wanted to withdraw money to pay the workers' wages.
In 2017, Kenya came again, and Deng Changwu had experience and stopped work ahead of schedule. Riots broke out again, and the project was suspended for a year amid repeated elections. All Deng Changwu can do is be patient, just like the first lesson he learned in Africa, "never think about punctuality".
In August 2017, Nairobi, Kenya,** riots were sparked after doubts about the results of the vote count. In the past two decades, it is difficult to say how much the African real estate market has changed, especially compared with China.
In the same time span, driven by fierce market competition and strong purchasing power, China's residential buildings have evolved more than once, with stone and aluminum panels used for facades, and swimming pools and clubs built in residential areas.
But in Africa, it's still a much simpler construction business, buying half a football field of land and building dozens to hundreds of houses. In general, a good multi-storey residential plot ratio (the ratio of the total area of above-ground buildings to the net land area of a community) should not exceed 3, and the lower the plot ratio, the better the living experience. In China, even the plot ratio of a relocated home is usually no more than 3, but the plot ratio of real estate in Africa can reach 4 or even higher – and even then, only middle- and high-income people can afford to buy it.
In fact, so far, it is almost impossible to make ordinary people's money in the real estate business. Huanghai, who came to Africa to start a business without graduating from university, has verified this with repeated failures.
Huang Hai, a self-proclaimed "secondary school boy", came to Africa in 2015 with the dream of "changing the lives of 1 million people". By 2019, in Nigeria, the economic leader of West Africa, he set his sights on the local rental market, imitating the Lianjia logo and store decoration, and established the rental platform X-Home.
He had many entrepreneurial experiences, and he was supported by capital, and at first he was very ambitious, and in his vision, this business would not only make money by intermediary fees, but also introduce property management and finance to make money from value-added services. And their customers will cover the entire Lagos, the former capital of Nigeria. With a population of more than 20 million, Lagos is the most populous city in Africa, and its status in Africa is equivalent to that of Shanghai, China.
But as soon as the project started, Huang Hai realized that something was wrong. Most ordinary people, such as supermarket cashiers and waiters, have an annual salary of four or five thousand yuan for the whole family, and they have very low requirements for housing. The only requirement is that it is cheap, so cheap that the intermediary fee is not worth the cost of taking a look.
People at the lower levels sleep in bridges and slums. The slum rooms are small, two or three square meters, with rusty iron bricks to build a bed, and a pot hanging from the side is considered a kitchen. There is no wardrobe, and the clothes are hung directly on the wall.
Not to mention property management, X-Home provides domestic apartment-style butler services, which ordinary people simply can't afford to live in. Financial services are also useless, because the local law protects the tenant, the landlord can not evict the tenant at will, several times the tenant can not repay the loan, the agent can not take him, sometimes even evicted and sneaked in to live.
Unable to make ordinary people's money, Huang Hai gradually shifted his target audience to Chinese and Indians working in Nigeria. It's much easier to pitch to them, and it takes as little as a few minutes to sign a contract. But in the end, X-Home still didn't get started - the epidemic came, foreigners returned to China one after another, the houses were vacant, and the project was yellow.
In Africa today, the upper middle class and the wealthy are the main consumer force. This is the truth that entrepreneurs will know sooner or later. Deng Changwu's projects, whether they are apartments or villas, end up attracting customers from the wealthy class and the emerging middle class.
Two years ago, Andy transformed from construction management to sales, and saw the life of the top local wealthy people at a completely different level: they drove the best cars, sent their children to the United States to study, and a party could cost 100,000 yuan- However, these people are not Andy's target sellers. The high-density real estate built by Andy looks like a domestic relocation house, and even if the rich buy it, it is just to collect rent. The clients of these properties are the new local middle class such as lawyers and designers, some of whom come from slums and need safer and more comfortable homes after the class jump.
Andy tried the way of moving domestic sales. Eating at a restaurant and meeting diners, repairing a car to meet a car owner and boss, going to a bank to meet a teller, he goes out of his way to introduce himself, hoping that they will recommend customers, but there is almost nothing to gain.
It is better to maintain limited upper-class social relations to increase sales. Every time he returns to China, he will remember to bring gifts to upper-class customers, such as a good can of tea, in exchange for a customer's appreciation.
The market is not completely unchanged. Deng Changwu said that when he entered the industry in 2005, the local real estate industry was just starting to take off, and it was relatively easy to sell a house at that time. By 2017, the market had become much hotter, with not only Chinese developers, but also Indians, Pakistanis, and local Kenyan investors joining in.
Andy, who came to Kenya in 2018, happened to witness the changes in the new era: the land transaction amount was **; The sales cycle has also been extended; The developer's involution makes it difficult to sell well**.
But the target audience has not changed. Andy said that, like Deng Changwu's clients 20 years ago, the wealth-wielding class is still the main buyer. The only change is that the wealthy have more properties in their hands, the desire to buy is decreasing, and developers need to make better products to impress each other.
Such as the introduction of smart door locks, surveillance and security doors. Andy said. And that's it, the pool, the garden, the balcony, none of that is needed – Kenya as a whole has a population larger than Yunnan province, but its GDP is only 1 4 – and most of them can't afford a better house.
High-density development by Chinese real estate developers in Africa. Source: Compared with the constraints of six years ago when he first arrived in Africa, Andy has now learned to roast sheep while dancing with local workers. When he was happy, he photographed the carpenter who had claimed to him dancing, and felt that they were also quite free and happy.
He saved money and began to grow new ambitions, dreaming of developing real estate independently like Deng Changwu in the future, and sending his children to study in Britain and the United States. But for Andy, there is still a certain distance from such a dream.
Before that, he also thought about whether to return to China. Every weekend, when he watched his neighbors go out to worship, he missed his wife and children back home. Because of the epidemic, he missed the birth of his daughter. He insisted on writing letters to his son every year, and seven or eight of them were sent out, but there was no reply. Finally, when I returned to China to meet, my son asked if I could not go to Africa, but he didn't know how to answer.
Time and distance have changed a lot, and he finds that the relationship with his wife is gradually fading, and life is like two parallel lines, more of a legal relationship. His wife once spent 220,000 yuan to invest in a house, but he couldn't stop it from opposing it many times.
Whether to stay or return to China is a choice that Chinese businessmen always face. In the blink of an eye, Huang Hai had been in Africa for almost a decade, and he told the studio that if he was given another chance, he would not come to Africa.
Huanghai started his business when he was in college, and in 2015, while still studying, he earned the first pot of gold in his life - 1 million yuan through education and training. At that time, I felt relatively free in terms of wealth and should pursue some more idealistic goals. Once, the counselor talked to him about his life ambitions and asked him, "What kind of person do you want to be?" As a young man, he was immediately ignited, and he remembered some of the African friends he had made in the Chinese Bridge community, when he learned about poverty in Africa, and I wanted to make a difference in the lives of African people. So, the Yellow Sea came to Africa.
In the past 9 years in Africa, the entrepreneurship of the Yellow Sea has basically failed. He is 31 years old this year, and his family always urges him to go home and get married. But he doesn't plan to go back yet, and he has to make some name for himself before he can go back. It's like playing a game at the table, he loses the money in front of him, and he believes that he can get it back in the next game. In May last year, he began to devote himself to agriculture again, and he is confident that he will succeed this time.
In a way, my hometown is completely unfamiliar. When he returned to China to participate in the dinner, Huang Hai raised his wine glass, but he didn't know how to speak. He found himself more attuned to Africa, a much simpler society.
Deng Changwu is familiar with this feeling. In the past, every time he returned to Chengdu, he felt as if he was returning to the city from the countryside. When he took the bus, he found that everyone used electronic payment, and he couldn't operate it, so he stood there awkwardly and didn't know what to do. He was also ashamed to mention doing real estate in Africa, everyone thought it was big business, but his projects in Africa were too small to show off, and sometimes he simply said that he would do a little small**.
At that time, Deng Changwu would also be entangled in whether to stay in Africa or return to China, but after many years, when asked this question again, he gave a seemingly perfect answer:Place yourself in two countries with an open mind and don't have to worry about which one is the real home. 」
In Africa, he married another wife and had children (where multiple wives were legal). In China, he also bought a villa, he said, you can live on both sides, and when the domestic climate is good, you will return to China.
He has reached retirement age, and his eldest daughter is gradually starting to take over his business. In the past two years, the global economy has declined, the local currency has depreciated by 30%, the purchasing power has declined, and he has slowed down the progress of real estate development and focused on renting out existing properties. What remains unchanged is that the customer base is still the local middle and upper class and foreigners. The monthly rent of a 100-square-meter house is three or four thousand, and only those with a monthly salary of more than 10,000 yuan can afford to rent it.
Although real estate in Africa is not what it used to be**, entrepreneurs are convinced that the future is still imaginative.
In 2018, aerial photography of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. Source: Visual China (At the request of the interviewee, Andy is a pseudonym.) ）
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