Buy now, if you can afford it

When is it a good time to buy a home? That’s been a no-brainer for the Chinese for decades. The simple, timetested, indisputable answer has been: “At the earliest”.

For, a nanosecond of hesitation may cost you a chance to buy that dream home and live happily ever after.

But, as Nobel laureate Bob Dylan wrote, times they are a-changin’.

A friend of mine once said the worst bit of a homebuying experience in Shanghai is neither the potentially prohibitive price nor the steep property agent commission, but the possibility of failing to buy an ideal apartment after you sell your old home.

As it transpired, she and her family had made what turned out to be an unwise decision of selling their home first and then failing to buy a potentially better one at the right time.

They didn’t sew up the deal in time, and the apartment’s price soared by up to 2 million yuan ($317,460) in less than two months.

Such life experiences are not uncommon. A young white-collar couple had to fork out half-a-million yuan more in the space of a few minutes, during which they pondered options over a breakfast.

The story, probably apocryphal, goes that the couple thought the non-refundable 18,000 yuan earnest money deposit for an apartment located in Tongzhou of Beijing was a bit on the higher side. They couldn’t make up their minds. So, they decided to think through while savoring pancakes during breakfast at a restaurant near the property project.

The pancakes were delicious all right but turned out to be their most expensive breakfast ever. By the time they finished eating, the apartment, the last one available, sold out. Chastened, they settled for a flat of the same size in a different housing project, which was to be launched later, but paid 500,000 yuan more eventually.

The face of China’s residential property market started changing when it went hyper-commercial in 1998 and never stopped growing since, surprising everybody year after year.

Last December, Shanghai’s new home prices skyrocketed to reach 49,648 yuan per square meter. So, to rein in