Long-term rental flats highlight at Xiamen habitat exhibition

Long-term rental apartments drew the most attention at the three-day Xiamen Human Habitat Exhibition, which came to a successful conclusion on Dec 31.

Four meters high, one desk and one wardrobe below a bed, and a dominant light yellow hue: that was the sample apartment presented at the exhibition by Port Apartment, subsidiary of China's leading real-estate company Vanke Group.

Port's sample housing illustrates the features of long-term rental apartments: no senior citizens, no kids and no pets.

Wu Di, general manager of Port Apartment, believes that long-term rental apartments offer more options for young people and also help a city retain out-of-town talents.

The apartments target young people aged from 18 to 35 or other middle and high end consumers.

"What we rent out is not just a house with apartments, but also a kind of lifestyle," Wu explained. "We offer customers personalized designs and professional living services; reading activities and parties will also be organized to enhance tenants' communications."

Although these apartments are usually more expensive than other kinds of apartments, they are still popular among young people.

"It's more stable to rent a house from enterprises than from an individual landlord," a customer of Port Apartment said who had been forced to move out twice in three years before she entered into a long-term rental agreement.

Xiamen's long-term rental apartment project first appeared at the beginning of 2016, when it was quite a new concept and attracted only a few enterprises.

Now more and more enterprises have set foot in the long-term rental apartment project, including real estate developers and agencies, internet enterprises, financial institutions and even state-owned enterprises. The rental market in Xiamen is facing serious competition.

Industry insiders believe that there is still a vast market in the coastal city based on its large net population inflow each year.

The 2017 Xiamen Human Habitat Exhibition consists of a human habitat pavilion, a rental housing pavilion, a building energy conservation pavilion, and others showing the city's achievements in building construction, elder-care policies, and the layout of future subway lines.