In Huizhou, where housing prices have plummeted, it has become a Dubai alternative for the middle class.

AI Q&A · What development story is hidden behind Huizhou’s low housing prices?

Author / Wang Dong

Editor / Yan Ruyi

Over the past week, A-share investors have truly experienced big swings and roller-coaster moves.

More exhilarating than the A-shares may only be Dubai’s real estate.

Since the war began, in just two short weeks, Dubai’s home prices have crashed by 30%.

In the past few years, Dubai has attracted countless digital nomads thanks to favorable tax policies and the low-threshold “Golden Visa.”

Many people believe that as long as you have some savings and a job that can be done remotely, you can go to Dubai and live a “early retirement” life.

However, all that prosperity is built on the illusion of Dubai’s “Middle East safe haven.”

When the fighting broke out, new immigrants and long-term visitors seemed to suddenly snap awake: sleeping next to a powder keg—of course it makes insomnia easy.

So when Dubai collapses, what will be the next “no-pressure” sanctuary for digital nomads?

Someone offered the answer:

In the far East, a city called Huizhou.

Huizhou, the new hub for digital nomads

When people suggested Huizhou is the new capital for digital immigrants, many were shocked, and they kept asking:

Where is Huizhou?

Huizhou is a prefecture-level city under Guangdong Province, located in the southeast of Guangdong. It sits at the eastern end of the Pearl River Delta, bordering Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and is one of the important cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, a national historic and cultural city……

Clearly, none of the answers above can explain why Huizhou has become young people’s new “lying-flat” destination.

Sun Yuchen, who was born in Huizhou and graduated from the First High School of Huizhou, may represent many people who look favorably on Huizhou.

In “Sun Ge’s” view, Huizhou has many advantages—low prices, safety, pleasant scenery, and a livable climate. Whether it’s Bangkok, New Singapore, or New York and London, none of them can compare.

Sun Yuchen is not the first person to recommend Huizhou.

In Goodbye, Love (Zaijian Airen), the once-popular internet celebrity Liu Qishou has long been thinking about moving to Huizhou to live in a big high-floor apartment, riding a motorcycle to go surfing every day, facing the sea as spring blossoms and warm weather last.

Tracing it back a thousand years earlier, long ago there was a well-known internet celebrity in Huizhou who said something like this:

After eating three hundred lychees a day, I have no intention of quitting life as a Lingnan native.

Huizhou is not a small city. In terms of area, it is the second-largest city in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area—covering 11k square kilometers, roughly equivalent to six Shenzhens. In terms of population, it has more than 6 million people. In terms of the economy, Huizhou’s total GDP consistently ranks fifth in Guangdong Province.

However, Huizhou’s city image doesn’t quite match this data:

A giant on paper, a small town to the senses.

After all, sandwiched between top-tier city clusters like Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Dongguan, Huizhou’s spotlight inevitably dims a bit.

Everyone says Huizhou is great—so what exactly is Huizhou great for?

What corresponds to its large footprint is that Huizhou’s industries and population are extremely scattered. Huicheng District has the liveliness of an old town, but it’s far from Guangzhou and Shenzhen; in Huiyang and Dayawan, near Shenzhen, there are isolated “sleep towns” one after another.

When you walk around Huizhou, it’s hard to feel the kind of “big-city pressure” that hits you in the face in Guangzhou or Shenzhen. Instead, you feel as if it’s made up of countless unconnected small towns.

〓 Photo source: Xiaohongshu @麦克抽

Housing supply here is said to be able to accommodate the entire population of Guangdong.

And thanks to an overabundance of supply, Huizhou’s housing prices have stayed low for a long time.

In remote areas around Shuangyue Bay and Xunliao Bay, seaside property can be as cheap as hundreds of thousands of yuan per unit—roughly equal to a single square meter next door in Shenzhen.

Even new homes in decent locations are only about 7,000 to 8,000 yuan per square meter—around one-third of Dongguan.

If you rent, it’s even more cost-effective: you can rent a seaside apartment for just one or two thousand yuan per month—two-bedroom, unbeatable sea views, and with housekeeping.

What’s cheap isn’t just housing prices.

Compared with Shenzhen and Hong Kong, Huizhou’s everyday prices are about like charity. For breakfast tea, in single-digit prices; the Hengli noodle soup for 15 yuan a bowl—these are like spiritual massage for every working person.

On Shui Dong Street, at 2 a.m. you can still get the freshest seafood BBQ stall.

Cheap doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no good stuff, and Huizhou’s quality of life is also quite good.

The previous “lying-flat sanctuary” that young people chased after was Hegang in Heilongjiang. There, home prices were even lower—tens of thousands of yuan could buy you a two-bedroom apartment.

Now, many of the first wave of young people who went to Hegang have already returned. After just one winter, it was more than enough to teach every young person who didn’t know the difference between right and wrong—at least enough of a lesson.

Compared with the climate that makes you suffer, the bigger problem for Hegang is simply being far from modern life.

Even the Five Kingdom City where Song Huizong squatted in a cold prison, and Ningguta where Zhen Yuandao was banished—are still located a bit farther south than Hegang.

Here you can’t find anything like a decent job, and you can’t really talk about having any social circle.

All of these problems do not exist in Huizhou.

Here you can get to Shenzhen with a step on the gas. Going to Hong Kong or Guangzhou takes an intensity roughly equal to commuting for a Beijing working person.

Digital nomads can retreat from the world, but they can’t go offline. In Huizhou, you can not only catch the wind from the Pacific—you can also get news from the frontiers of the times.

〓 Huizhou-born singer “Lao La”

Because venue rental fees and security costs in Huizhou are lower than in Shenzhen, many big-name artists now skip Dongguan and choose Huizhou as the fixed stop for Greater Bay Area tours.

You can effortlessly maintain a social circle from a first-tier city, and even your cultural life won’t fall behind.

The environment here is also not something Hegang can compare with.

Huizhou is one of the cities in the country with the best air quality.

In winter, the average winter temperature is 15°C. There are at most two weeks that are really cold each year. During the Spring Festival you can even wear short sleeves. Open the door and you’re at the best beach in Guangdong.

Warmer than Hegang, cheaper than Dali, more convenient than Rushan……

With that, it looks like Huizhou is basically paradise. So does Huizhou have no drawbacks at all?

Of course it’s not that simple.

Who bears the weight and keeps moving forward

When young people start pouring into Huizhou, they’ll find that the elderly are already there.

Especially the elderly men and women from the Northeast.

Compared with young people who are only just realizing that nomads can be a kind of identity, they are the seasoned “migratory birds” and modern-day nomads of society.

In Huizhou, you can eat the most authentic Northeast barbecue and old-style spicy noodle soup—nearly comparable to Sanya;

In Dayawan and Xunliao Bay, Northeast Mandarin is a common language.

As far back as more than ten years ago, Huizhou’s home-buying advertisements were already aimed at people from the Northeast.

In terms of motives and needs, retirement and lying flat have a lot in common.

For the elderly, winter in the north is not only cold—it also comes with expensive heating bills, very low rates of outdoor activity, and threats to respiratory and cardiovascular health.

For young people, first-tier cities’ high rents, endless overtime, and extremely high social costs are another kind of “frostbite.”

Older people recover their physical condition; young people recover their mental state.

To answer how Huizhou became the price lowland it is today, you also have to start with this city’s feverish history of building new towns.

Around 2015, as Shenzhen’s home prices began to skyrocket and purchase restrictions kept escalating, newcomers in Shenzhen who hadn’t had time to “get on the train” started shifting their targets to satellite cities in the Greater Bay Area.

Huizhou, with ample land supply and no purchase restrictions, became the first choice for Shenzhen buyers.

At that time, property developers led by Country Garden and Financial Street, among others, began an unprecedented “city-building” campaign in Huizhou.

The sales offices of the projects in Dayawan were built like an airport—every day, dozens of shuttle buses, sometimes even hundreds, brought customers from Shenzhen and even from all over the country to drum up business.

The most brainwashing slogan back then was “Live in a villa seaside apartment with just 1/5 of Shenzhen’s housing price.”

〓 This epic big pie still hasn’t been realized

In the era when the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Bridge was still just a rumor and Metro Line 14 was still on paper, countless investors believed the fairytale of “Shenzhen and Huizhou as one city,” thinking this would be the next Shenzhen’s Nanshan.

In 2016, the projects in Dayawan near Shenzhen surged from 7,000 yuan/m² to 13k yuan quickly.

And even then, people still had to scramble for them—things like tea money, renaming fees, bundled parking spaces……

At that time, Huizhou didn’t just attract a large number of Shenzhen buyers; it also reaped funds from all over the country through a powerful distribution network.

Many people even didn’t visit the property—they signed contracts after only looking at the show flats.

Pros because of Shenzhen, failures because of Shenzhen.

In 2021, as developers started to default and real estate regulation tightened, Shenzhen’s property market began to cool down. As a shadow product of Shenzhen’s housing market, Huizhou’s real estate effectively slid downhill in almost no time.

The stories that supported Huizhou’s housing-price narrative didn’t look solid either.

The delayed East extension of the metro still couldn’t land; the progress of the Shenzhen-Huizhou / Shenzhen-Dongguan intercity services also wasn’t ideal. The Shenzhen Eastward expansion and Huizhou integration that had been speculated on for years stayed on paper.

Every first-tier city needs a Huizhou

Even now, many people’s homes are “trapped” in Huizhou.

For example, my friend Xiao Wang.

In 2019, he entered Huizhou’s real estate market. The home he carefully selected is now so unwanted that it might be given away for free—because the remaining mortgage is higher than the full upfront payment for a brand-new home.

The owners who bought in the same community back then, their assets have generally shrunk by more than 50%.

For those people who bought the wrong homes at the wrong time, wrong place, and wrong price, this is a painful de-leveraging process. But for young people who arrived here like migratory birds:

Huizhou is a place without historical baggage.

The real estate frenzy of those years left Huizhou with buildings and infrastructure far beyond what the local population could accommodate. Those excess resources were exactly taken over by young people who want to escape grind culture and pursue a low-cost lifestyle.

After a decade of grinding-in, the big pie from back then—high-speed rail, parts of commercial amenities, and green parks—may have arrived slowly, but it has landed for some of it at least.

Every sea breeze in Dayawan carries, behind it, a Shenzhen property owner who is trapped in the investment, silently sighing.

After the bubble cleared, Huizhou instead became friendlier to young people.

When housing prices didn’t hold up, life started to improve. Cheap seaside homes with extremely low rental costs, and less crowded coastal promenades brought Huizhou back to its essence as a vacation destination.

Of course, those young people who poured into Huizhou would soon discover what’s inconvenient here.

Those cheap seaside homes and apartments in videos shot by video bloggers are mostly located in near-Shenzhen areas such as Dayawan and Huiyang districts.

〓 Shuangyue Bay in Huidong is one of Huizhou’s more popular vacation spots

Getting from here to Huizhou’s main urban area, Huicheng District, is extremely inconvenient.

The high-speed rail to Shenzhen can be short enough—about 20 minutes per trip—and it looks attractive. But the real problem is: how do you actually get out the door?

Most of the popular developments here are isolated, enclosed communities. Public transportation isn’t just “not good”—it’s basically nonexistent.

If you don’t buy a car, then getting in and out only relies on shuttles or rides you can hardly book on demand; and if you buy a car just to live in Huizhou, then you’ve lost the “nomad” meaning.

There are top-tier hospitals and a Sam’s Club, but nobody goes there every day. As for truly crucial community commercial options, you can only say it’s better than nothing.

Low home prices are already the result of excess supply. So if you live here, you’ll inevitably face another problem created by that excess:

No neighbors.

In many super-large communities, occupancy rates are only about 20% to 30%. During the day it’s tolerable; but at night, the experience just isn’t as beautiful.

Even the most “i” person can easily underestimate their need for social life.

But for young people who come and go freely like migratory birds, these shortcomings and real-life inconveniences are actually not the real problems.

The only problem is that history has already told us: once a place grows from a niche into a mainstream “lying-flat sanctuary,” boosted by social apps and short videos, a flood of tourists comes in and trendy coffee shops open up on every corner. Housing prices and rents will quietly rise, food and daily costs will gradually increase, and living costs will keep coming back like tides.

All the advantages that originally attracted us to stay will, little by little, become more and more expensive as more people move in.

Once Huizhou truly becomes an ideal country where young people cluster together, it won’t be the same Huizhou of low costs and slow pace where you can lie flat with peace of mind.

Maybe at that time, young people will need to look for the next Huizhou again.