(Yicai) April 10 -- A Beijing property developer is taking the unprecedented step of offering a holiday home in the coastal city of Yantai to buyers who make upfront payments for properties in its development in east Beijing. The move reflects the lengths to which Chinese real estate firms are going to boost sales, industry insiders said.

Anyone who pays cash for a 77-square-meter apartment in the project in Beijing’s Tongzhou district before the end of the month will also receive a 108-sqm house with a sea view in Yantai, a city 700 kilometers away in eastern Shandong province, the developer said last week.

This is approximately equivalent to a 10 percent discount, industry insiders told Yicai. The market price of the Beijing property is around CNY4.7 million (USD650,000) while that of the one in Yantai is around CNY450,000.

Although many developers are offering promotions, it is still quite rare to give away real estate, Guan Rongxue, a senior analyst at think tank Zhuge Data Research Center, told Yicai.

It also highlights the difficulties that homebuilders are facing in Yantai, once a popular coastal get-away, Guan said. Many developers built holiday homes in the city, but there has been a high vacancy rate in recent years.

In 2019, at the peak of property sales in Yantai, housing prices doubled. But since 2020, the Yantai real estate market has been on a downward slide and developers have had to slash the price of seafront properties.

The Yantai houses being offered for free used to cost around CNY6,000 (USD830) per square meter, but now prices have fallen to as little as CNY4,400 per square meter, a local real estate agent told Yicai.

Yantai’s real estate market is closely tied to the tourism market, Guan said. If there is a rebound in the number of visitors, property sales should start to recover. Otherwise, they will remain under pressure.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor