Man buys 68 sq.m apartment for $1.64 during China's biggest shopping festival

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A man from eastern China has bought a 68-square-meter apartment in the northeastern Chinese city of Hegang for 11 yuan (US$1.64) in a Singles' Day promotion on Alibaba's asset auction platform.

Bidding opened at 1 yuan at 3 p.m. on Nov. 5, with each bid adding 0.01 yuan and the apartment going to the first bidder to reach the 11-yuan cap. The auction drew 1,677 registrants and ended two minutes and 20 seconds later, after 1,001 bids.

Liu, a manager at Shenyang Hengyu Tongda Auction Co., which handled the sale, told Cover News the auction was genuine and part of the platform's Singles' Day (Nov. 11) campaign.

The platform covered the difference between the sale price and the apartment's market value of about 40,000 yuan, Liu said, adding that such low-price sales are a marketing event rather than a regular practice.

The buyer has paid the 11 yuan and the platform's service fee and is completing the title transfer, which will cost him about 2,000 yuan in deed tax. He said he has no plans to move to Hegang and intends to use the apartment as a holiday home on trips to see the snow in the northeast.

The apartment is on the seventh floor of a walk-up building in Hegang's Gongnong District, and its property records show no mortgage, seizure or ownership dispute.

Hegang, a coal-mining city in Heilongjiang Province, became an online byword for cheap housing in 2019 amid reports that apartments there sold for as little as 20,000 yuan. Buyers from outside the city accounted for more than 34% of its home purchases in 2024, according to the local housing bureau.

The sale stirred envy on Chinese social media, with one user asking why they had only seen the listing after it closed, the South China Morning Post reported. Another noted that annual property management fees would make a rarely used apartment a burden.

Wang Yuchen, founding partner of Beijing Jinsu Law Firm, told Yicai that such low-price auctions are not just a way of testing the waters but a marketing tactic.

Buyers of homes with title defects must go to court to resolve them at considerable cost, and may also face undisclosed taxes, unpaid property management fees or mortgage debts, he warned.

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