Five years ago, Lin Feiran’s family bought a house at a high price. To date, the house price has fallen by a full 1 million yuan.
This 1 million yuan made her husband feel uneasy. After their marriage, starting from the fall in house prices, Lin Feiran and her husband frequently quarreled. In these five years, whenever they talked about money, he couldn’t help but complain to his wife that they shouldn’t have bought the house.
In November 2025, Lin Feiran, unable to bear it any longer, registered for a divorce.
After the house prices were ‘halved’, the lives of some people were also ‘halved’.
The group that bought houses in the past five years were mostly ‘post-90s’. After working for a few years, they began to step into the ‘next stage’ of life—buying a house, getting married, starting a family, and so on. They originally thought it was the starting point of entering the next stage of life, but they were burdened with debt and heavy burdens due to the fall in house prices.
Due to the severe decline, some consumers who bought houses at high prices even needed to ‘pay extra’ to sell their houses. That is, the proceeds from selling the house were not enough to repay the bank loan, and the down payment became a complete illusion.
Under the fluctuations that have lasted for several years, the value and positioning of houses, as well as their relationship with life satisfaction, have also begun to be re-examined by people.
1 million yuan, evaporated
Lin Feiran never expected that buying a house, which is a common life event for most families, would bring instability to her marriage.
In 2021, the couple spent 1.8 million yuan to buy a two-bedroom apartment in Hefei. It was Lin Feiran’s suggestion to change houses, and her husband was originally against it. He hoped to wait another two years so that they could get it all done at once. But at that time, their first child had been born and was about to go to kindergarten, and the family of three was still squeezed into a small one-bedroom apartment. Lin Feiran thought, ‘Anyway, the small apartment is also going up in price, it’s better to raise some money and borrow some now, and the down payment will come out’.
At Lin Feiran’s insistence, she and her husband borrowed 200,000 yuan to make up the 1 million yuan down payment. Now, the market price of this house has fallen to 800,000 yuan, which is equivalent to 1 million yuan going down the drain.
House prices started to fall around 2023. It was also after that that her husband began to complain frequently, ‘He always feels like he’s a sucker’, Lin Feiran said, almost every month when he got his salary, her husband would complain once, ‘saying that he felt we were too hardworking, doing so much work, and the house was still a loss, pure leeks.’
But her husband still couldn’t get over it, and almost every month, he would have a big fight with Lin Feiran because of the house. They would argue on WeChat at work, have a cold war after work, and then reconcile after a few days of cold war, but the knot was still there.
This September, after a big fight, Lin Feiran started to write a divorce agreement and handed it to her husband. After reading it, her husband was silent for a long time, saying that he didn’t want to divorce and vowed that he would no longer mention the house. Later, the two of them took a walk together, and her husband would also reflect on himself, ‘feeling that this matter shouldn’t be dwelled on’.
However, two months later, because her husband’s sister was getting married, the two of them had another argument over the trivial matters of red envelopes. In a moment of desperation, her husband blurted out again, ‘You lost 2 million yuan on the house, why don’t you say anything?’
Lin Feiran couldn’t bear it anymore. In the two years after buying the house, whenever any money-related matter was mentioned, her husband would bring up the house. ‘Because of this house, he said the most vicious words in his life, as if I was a sinner, as if he would have become rich if he hadn’t bought this house.’
From dating to marriage, Lin Feiran and her husband have been together for 11 years. They both came from a small place in Anhui, studied and worked in Hefei together, and settled down. Now, they have two children, the older one is in elementary school. In Lin Feiran’s memory, from the time they were in love, her husband has always been a more stubborn person, but before they encountered such a big thing as buying a house, the two of them had never had any major conflicts.
In fact, the pressure of buying a house was not too great for the couple’s combined income. Now, the mortgage on this house is almost paid off. The two children have to go to school, and housing is a necessity, ‘(At that time) we couldn’t not buy it, right?’
Lin Feiran also felt wronged. Although buying a house was her suggestion, her husband also made the decision together after being satisfied with the layout and actual utilization rate. Now, many of her friends around her have bought houses at high prices, ‘but none of them are as unhappy as we are’.
No one can predict the future. Jin Yi, who is 29 years old this year, said, ‘People don’t have foresight’. If he had known that house prices would fall so badly, he would definitely not have taken out a mortgage to buy that commercial house in 2021.
At that time, Jin Yi bought a wedding house in Wuhan for a total price of 1.6 million yuan. He and his parents contributed about 80%, and his girlfriend contributed the remaining 20%. Now, Jin Yi has to pay 5,000 yuan per month, which accounts for about 60% of his salary.
In fact, including the renovation, the total price of this house was about 200,000 yuan more than his original budget. But at that time, ‘gritting your teeth’ and ‘making do’ was the idea of many young people, including him. Two years after buying the house, he knew that house prices had started to fall, but he didn’t spend much time paying special attention to it, ‘to avoid being upset’. He also wouldn’t take the initiative to talk about the changes in house prices with his wife at home.
Until September 2025, Jin Yi accidentally learned that an old classmate had bought a house in the same community as him, and the total price was a full 500,000 yuan cheaper. 500,000 yuan almost covered Jin Yi’s down payment that year.
In September 2025, the average price of second-hand houses in 70 major and medium-sized cities fell
‘I knew house prices had fallen, but I didn’t expect them to fall so much.’ Jin Yi sighed with emotion. He felt such a solid sense of pain for the first time about ‘500,000 yuan’. He would have to work for 3-4 years without eating or drinking to earn it. ‘It’s easy for some people to earn 500,000 yuan, but it may be difficult to save 500,000 yuan.’
The changes brought about by the fluctuation of house prices are multifaceted. Jin Yi still remembers that in those days, they tried to negotiate some intermediary fees with the intermediary, but the 2.5% intermediary fee couldn’t be negotiated at all. Now, in the same intermediary agency, the intermediary fee has automatically dropped to 1%.
Jin Yi was born in 1996. He started dating his girlfriend in college, and after graduating for four or five years, they naturally entered into marriage. He joked that ‘post-95s’ like him, who work, get married, and buy a house according to the social clock, are the most likely to buy at a high price.
He couldn’t understand why, after always entering the next stage of life in the order expected by society, working hard and living, he suddenly ‘stalled’ at the step of buying a house?
Life at a discount*
Now, after paying off the mortgage every month, and excluding the necessary living expenses, there is almost nothing left in Jin Yi’s bank card.
Although homebuyers knew how much they would have to pay for the down payment and loan when they signed the contract, the price fluctuations from the market directly affected the lives and mentality of the homebuyers.
When it comes to the day of paying the mortgage, he feels a sense of frustration when he sees the numbers in his bank card decrease sharply. ‘If I hadn’t bought this house, would I be able to live more freely? I might not have to be so concerned about some nitpicking at work, and not be so worried about losing my job.’ At the moment of deducting the mortgage, Jin Yi would briefly ‘yearn’ for a better life, but gradually, he would stop imagining it.
As a major expense that most ordinary people spend only a few times in their lives, house prices directly affect the life order and plan of a family. Jin Yi originally planned to buy a car as soon as he got married, but it wasn’t until recently that he bought a car for about 100,000 yuan. Before getting married, he and his wife also planned to travel to many places, but now five years have passed, and they haven’t been to any place. ‘They can’t stop working’.
In the past five years, under the environment of a sharp drop in house prices, but wages have not increased, he and his wife had to reduce their living costs.
When they first bought the house, Jin Yi felt that the economic situation was still relatively good. Almost every week, he and his wife would spend 300-400 yuan on eating out, and they would spend more than 1,000 yuan a month just on eating out. Now, the couple hardly eat out, unless they encounter very cheap coupons. But before, the two of them almost never worried about the price when eating out, ‘They would go to eat wherever they heard it was delicious’.
There were also some moments when Jin Yi would think about selling the house. But then he thought again, ‘The house price has fallen to this level, if I sell it, it won’t even cover the loan.’ So he also dismissed the idea.
After the house lost 1.8 million yuan, whether to sell or not also put Wang Fanfan, who is 30 years old, in a dilemma.
At the end of 2019, in order to make it easier for her child to go to school, Wang Fanfan bought a house in Nanjing for 3 million yuan, with a down payment of 900,000 yuan and a loan of 2.1 million yuan. In the first two years, she and her husband had to pay more than 10,000 yuan in mortgage every month. Although the interest rate has been lowered in the past two years, the monthly payment is still around 9,500 yuan.
Five years have passed, but the total price of this house has fallen by a full 1 million yuan. ‘Plus the various interest and money spent in the past five years, if I sell it, I will lose at least 1.8 million yuan, and I won’t be able to pay off the debt, and I won’t have a place to go. But if I don’t sell it, I can’t hold on at all.’
1.8 million yuan, when spread out in life, is a real ‘huge sum of money’. In the past, Wang Fanfan loved to go shopping and buy clothes, but now she almost has to ‘wait until the season changes and there’s nothing to wear’ before going to the cheap e-commerce websites to buy discounted items. In the past, she would also occasionally go out to ‘eat out’, but now she has completely become a ‘kitchen nail householder’. During holidays, she wants to take her children out to travel, but she is also discouraged by the ticket prices. In the end, the family only went to free parks and climbed mountains.
As house prices get lower and lower, Wang Fanfan feels more and more pressure. ‘Every time I open my eyes, my mind is full of that nearly 10,000 yuan mortgage number. I can’t sleep at night at all. I’m really afraid that one day I’ll lose my job and I won’t be able to keep the house. All the hard work of saving money for so many years will be in vain.’
In October 2025, Wang Fanfan finally made up her mind and put the house on the market, and the selling price was lower than the total amount of the loan.
Buying at a high price and selling at a low price may lead to such a situation: the total price of the house sale is less than the amount of the loan. Near the end of 2025, Xiao Yang, an intermediary in Guangzhou, began to contact some owners who ‘paid extra to sell their houses’. At the peak of house prices, an owner bought a school district house for more than 5 million yuan, with a loan of 3.6 million yuan. Now, they only sold it for 3.1 million yuan.
In 2022, in order to get married, Lu Shen took out a mortgage to buy a small two-bedroom apartment in Shanghai for a total price of 6 million yuan, with a down payment of 2 million yuan and a monthly payment of nearly 20,000 yuan. At the end of 2024, when the listing price of the same apartment type in the same community dropped to nearly 4 million yuan, Lu Shen was laid off by the company.
At that time, the child had already been born, the house could not be sold, and life could not stop. The pressure of the whole family fell on Lu Shen alone. ‘Every day I open my eyes, it’s millions of debts’. Every month, the loan was deducted without fail, and ‘the savings were rapidly depleted like running water’. Lu Shen could hardly save any money.
He once fell into depression and often woke up three or four times at night. He thought of countless ways out, either to simply stop paying the mortgage and wait for the court auction, or to ‘get it over with’ and be done with it.
What Lu Shen regretted most was his prediction of the future situation. When he bought the house, why was he so sure that ‘he would be able to earn more than 30,000 yuan per month in the future?’
Reconcile with yourself
In 2019, Ke Yan and her husband bought a house in Suzhou, with a total price of 1.6 million yuan, a down payment of 500,000 yuan, and a loan of 1.1 million yuan. The commercial loan interest rate was 5.8%. In that year, the real estate market was still in an upward trend. The community where Ke Yan bought was quite popular. From the beginning of the sale, they were not allowed to use the housing provident fund, so they had to choose a pure commercial loan.
At that time, the couple worked in Shanghai, but they did not have the qualifications to buy a house in Shanghai for the time being. ‘We thought that we would sell the house in Suzhou and buy a house in Shanghai when we had the qualifications to buy a house in Shanghai.’ Ke Yan herself is in the real estate industry. In the two years when she first bought the house, the situation of the whole industry was good, and her monthly salary could reach 30,000 yuan.
In the two years, her monthly salary has dropped to just over 20,000 yuan.
From 2019 to 2020, house prices briefly rose for a while, but then they began to slowly decline. By 2025, the selling price of the same apartment type in Ke Yan’s community had dropped to 950,000 yuan. Although the monthly payment has been reduced from the original 6,800 yuan to the current 5,200 yuan, and the two of them have already paid more than 400,000 yuan in loans, they still owe the bank 980,000 yuan in principal, which is enough to offset a house. ‘That is to say, they only paid about 120,000 yuan in principal.’
Ke Yan calculated, ‘Even if we pay off the 980,000 yuan principal in one lump sum now, we will still lose more than 700,000 yuan.’ More than 700,000 yuan is enough to buy a small two-bedroom apartment in Ke Yan’s hometown, Luoyang.
‘At first, we didn’t pay attention, thinking that someone might be in urgent need of money to sell it. Later, the real estate collapsed, and it fell more and more.’ Ke Yan could only comfort herself with her own house, but she still couldn’t help but think, ‘If we hadn’t bought a house at that time, we could have bought a better location and a larger area now.’
People who bought houses at high prices were initially all for a happier life. Now, they can only comfort themselves with life itself. People who are drifting in the city, the need for a home is not a need that should be denied and reflected upon.
At the end of 2019, 30-year-old Lu Lu also took out a mortgage to buy a house in Shenzhen, a one-bedroom apartment for more than 2 million yuan, with a loan of more than 1 million yuan. At that time, she had a sum of money in her hand, and she was struggling between going to graduate school or buying a house. But if she wanted to go to graduate school, she had to give up her current job, so she chose to buy a house.
After graduating, Lu Lu has been working in Shenzhen. The moment she got the property certificate, she felt that she had finally ‘taken root’ in this first-tier city. At that time, Lu Lu was full of confidence, ‘This will be my appreciating asset, and it is proof of my personal ability.’ Even though, after buying it, that house has never been used for self-occupation, ‘I just felt that this matter was done, and I seemed to have succeeded a little.’
Unexpectedly, house prices began to fall, and now, Lu Lu’s house has fallen to more than 1 million yuan. In the past two years, the company projects where Lu Lu works have also been continuously losing money, and layoffs have been continuous. Although Lu Lu has not yet encountered a layoff crisis, a strong sense of unease about the future has always enveloped her. In July 2025, she also ended a 12-year relationship, and her life fell into a low point.
Everything was interrupted by external factors, but relatives and friends are still suggesting that she ‘get married quickly and have a child’. Lu Lu feels helpless and bitter. Now, at the age of 36, she has given up the obsession of living this life ‘step by step’. Fortunately, she has already paid off the loan. Now, she has rented out her house, and the monthly rent is more than 2,000 yuan, which happens to cover the rent she pays for living near the company.
She doesn’t regret buying that house. After renting for many years, Lu Lu has never bought her favorite furniture. The residence is completely without her own will, which will make her clearly feel that her sense of belonging to this city is insufficient.
In 2021, Jiang Ying, a 23-year-old real estate salesperson, used her first pot of gold to buy a ‘far and big new’ in the suburbs of Guangzhou, with a total price of 1.3 million yuan and a mortgage of 920,000 yuan. Now, four years have passed, and house prices have fallen by half, and Jiang Ying’s house is still vacant. If she sells it, not only will the down payment be completely lost, but she will also be burdened with another debt.
But Jiang Ying has been able to fully reconcile with herself. In those days, Jiang Ying was originally struggling between buying a house and buying a car. Now, looking back, she feels that it is better not to buy a car. ‘If I bought a Mercedes-Benz C260 that I liked, I would definitely go out and play often, and the parking fees would be expensive, and maybe all that would be left in a few years would be a discounted second-hand car and not much savings.’ At the age of 23, Jiang Ying had nearly 400,000 yuan in savings. She knew that according to her personality, if she didn’t buy a house or a car, this money would definitely be used for eating, drinking, and traveling, ‘or be borrowed by others’.
Jiang Ying’s mentality has thus been calmed. ‘Although I didn’t get the bonus and become rich by appreciation. But it has made me have a qualitative leap in my consumption concept—frugality.’
Buying a house, this major event, also made Jin Yi feel that he was finally forced to grow up a lot. Around the age of 24 or 25, he often looked forward to a better future. ‘I felt that those labels like ’35-year-old crisis’ on the Internet had nothing to do with me’. In just three or five years, he felt that changes might come tomorrow. He also felt the impact of those anxieties on ordinary people on the Internet in his work, and it was becoming ‘closer and closer to me’.
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