Crazy Town: A rotten sample of a "characteristic town"

In some places, characteristic towns are even regarded as enclosure artifacts.

Yao Long, 61, did not expect that what he feared had really happened — that a "small town" that rented his farmland to develop would suddenly come to an end.

The "town" yao long refers to is the "Serawi Huahai Town" located in Yao'ou Village, Chaoyang Town, Mengjin County, Henan Province, which is one of the thousands of "characteristic towns" that are currently under construction in China. Chaoyang Town, where it is located, is listed in the second batch of national characteristic town directories recognized by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

Some media commented that the rotten end of "Seravi Huahai Town" is not an isolated case, and some "characteristic towns" that have lost their characteristics are ultimately just a reproduction of another real estate project under the banner of "town" and the fact of "enclosure".

Random and changeable "characteristic town"

"Seravi Huahai Town" is located at the intersection of the Lianhuo Expressway and the Logi Expressway, covering a total area of 2,300 acres. In some introductions, it is called "a high-end low-density real estate project integrating multiple product types such as double-spelling, single-family houses, garden houses, etc., and creating a French elegant living residential area that integrates tourism, leisure, pension and real estate".

The project is jointly invested by Luoyang Seravi Real Estate Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Seravi Real Estate") and Luoyang Jiaxiang Cultural Tourism Development Co., Ltd. According to industrial and commercial information, the actual controllers of these two companies are Huang Jiwei.

Public information shows that before the operation of the "Seravi Huahai Town" project, Huang Jiwei had no experience in the development of real estate projects, nor did he have the operation experience of characteristic towns.

After graduating from university in 2002, Huang Jiwei founded Luoyang Weicheng Trading Co., Ltd. to distribute steel for some local real estate projects, and then invested in the establishment of a concrete mixing plant with an annual output value of 90 million yuan. In 2013, Huang Jiwei established Serawi Real Estate, which has won thousands of acres of land and begun to operate the "Flower Sea Town" project.

Mengjin County Natural Resources Bureau online land listing announcement shows that Seravi Real Estate auctioned three land in Yao'ou Village totaling more than 200 mu, the purpose is "urban residential land (residential compatible commercial land)", the transaction price of a total of 62.28 million yuan, the average price of 467 yuan / ㎡. Zhang Yafeng, director of the office of the Mengjin County Natural Resources Bureau, told the First Financial 1°C reporter that the land auctioned by Seravi Real Estate is not only three pieces mentioned above, but "five or six pieces", but he declined to disclose more information.

Except for some construction land, most of the land in "Huahai Town" is cultivated by villagers in nearby villages. Yao Long, a villager in Yao'ao Village, and others confirmed to the 1°C reporter that most of the good land they cultivate daily, totaling more than 1,000 mu, are rented by Seravi Real Estate, and the rent is calculated according to 1,000 kilograms of grain, and 1,200 yuan per mu of land is paid every year. Yao Long said that although he has leased the land to Seravi Property for 6 years, he has never seen any written land lease agreement, so he is more worried that if one day, there is a problem with the operation of Seravi Property, he may not even get the rental income of 1200 yuan per mu per year.

However, the local government had high hopes for the project.

On August 15, 2013, the foundation stone of "Seravi Flower Sea Town" was laid, and at that time, its name was "Seravi Creative Culture Tourism Park". The local government website said in a message titled "Luoyang Seravi Creative Culture and Tourism Park Started Construction" that the "Serawi" project was one of the major projects newly signed by Mengjin County that year with a single investment of more than 1 billion yuan.

A then-major leader of Mengjin County also said in his speech on the same day that the successful laying of the foundation stone of the "Seravi" project is not only the successful landing of the signed project of the 31st Luoyang Peony Cultural Festival, but also another achievement of the county's continuous implementation of the "investment promotion year".

In the Mengjin County Government network, just half a year after the project started, the main local leaders led dozens of units such as the county planning office, the land bureau, and the finance bureau to the site of the Serawi project, and included the project in the mengjin county key project and the provincial and municipal key project declaration list.

However, at that time, the preliminary planning of the "Seravi Project" was not yet a "thousand acres of flowers", but a cultural and leisure resort with the theme of wine culture in accordance with the standards of 4a-level scenic spots.

In 2014, the "Seravi Creative Culture Tourism Park" was quietly renamed "Seravi Huahai Town", and the overall planning was also changed from the previous wine theme culture to the creation of a thousand acres of flowers, in the planning, the project consists of two parts of high-end residences and flower landscapes, of which residential and supporting areas cover an area of 1100 acres, and the area of flower gardens is 1200 acres. "The sea of flowers of various styles gets rid of the single and repetitive mode of traditional tourism consumption and experience projects, and comprehensively embodies the four elements of 'sightseeing, recreation, landscape and ecology'." In a press release, Serawi Real Estate described the prospects of the "Flower Sea Town" in this way.

Rotten tail "Sea of Flowers"

Why was it suddenly changed to "Flower Sea Town"?

A local insider said that at that time, the national level continued to introduce support policies for "characteristic towns", including supporting qualified characteristic town construction projects to apply for special construction funds, giving appropriate incentives to characteristic towns that carried out better work, etc., which made Huang Jiwei see hope and believe that he could rely on his local political and business resources to obtain some incentives to alleviate financial pressure.

Huang Jiwei seems to be under tremendous financial pressure.

According to a number of judgments and rulings on the judgment document network, soon after the "Seravi Huahai Town" started, Huang Jiwei began to borrow money everywhere due to the tight capital chain.

On August 15, 2013, the foundation stone of the Serawi Project began. The next day, august 16, 2013, Huang Jiwei took Seravi Real Estate, Luoyang Weicheng Group Co., Ltd., Luoyang Jiaxiang Concrete Co., Ltd. and other borrowers as the main borrowers, and borrowed from Jin Keli and dozens of other people at a monthly interest rate of about 2 cents, borrowing as little as hundreds of thousands and as many as millions, but in the end, Huang Jiwei was sued by creditors because he was unable to repay the loan.

Another ruling on the dispute over the loan contract shows that Serawi Real Estate has repeatedly borrowed funds from Kang Yanzhao and others at a monthly interest rate of 2 cents through Henan Benhua Trading Co., Ltd., of which Kang Yanzhao alone lent Serawi Real Estate 2.1 million yuan.

Huang Jiwei also entrusted a number of investment companies such as Wuhan Fortune Yinquan Investment Management Co., Ltd. to borrow funds from creditors in Wuhan, Luoyang and other places, but in the end they were unable to return them.

An announcement by Xifangge, a company listed on the New Third Board, shows that the company once participated in a comprehensive ecological restoration landscape management project of "Seravi Huahai Town", but after the project ended, "Seravi Huahai Town" was unable to pay according to the project contract.

On July 9, 2015, After signing a steel sales contract with Seravi Real Estate, Xinguang Iron and Steel Company began to supply the latter, but until the end of the supply, Seravi Real Estate was unable to pay the purchase price of 149,000 yuan, and finally sued in court.

According to the data, from December 2015 to December 2018 alone, there were 61 well-documented judicial judgments involving Seravi Real Estate and its actual controller Huang Jiwei, involving 61 cases, ranging from ordinary private lending, financial loan contracts, to construction contract disputes, etc., and Huang Jiwei's own equity was frozen by the Luoyang Jian Xi District People's Court, the Xigong District People's Court, the Luolong District People's Court and the Luoyang Intermediate People's Court, etc. He has also been included in the list of judgment defaulters by many courts.

While facing financial pressure, the high-end villa project under the "Seravi Huahai Town" has also fallen into a state of poor sales due to incomplete procedures.

On the morning of March 14, the reporter of the First Finance 1 °C drove to visit this "flower town" that is said to cover an area of more than 2,000 acres. A person in charge of Seravi Real Estate said in an interview with reporters that the income of Serawi Real Estate comes from two aspects: First, the sales income of real estate projects such as townhouses and garden houses; The other is the ticket revenue of the future "Flower Sea Town". However, due to the fact that the "Flower Sea Town" is in the input period, many areas have not even planted flowers and trees, and have not been opened to the public, let alone ticket revenue.

The reporter saw at the scene that during working days, the door of the tourist reception center was closed. A staff member told reporters that some of the buildings under construction of Seravi Real Estate involve court litigation and are no longer sold to the outside world.

A field of chicken feathers

The reporter's investigation found that among the thousands of "characteristic towns" in the country, such as "Huahai Town", in the name of "town", the real estate is not an isolated case.

Also located in Mengjin County, from the "Serawi Huahai Town" but a few miles away from the Oriental Jindian Tangjie Town, is another high-end real estate project, in the project sales department, 1 °C reporter found that most of the real estate for sale are villas, the apartment type is double spelling 248 square meters, the average price of 13,000 yuan / ㎡.

In September 2018, the Financial and Economic Committee of the Henan Provincial People's Congress conducted a survey of some local "characteristic towns", after which they found that in actual work, a considerable number of cities and counties did not understand the characteristic towns in place, treated the characteristic towns as baskets, loaded everything inside, and directly put on the "hats" of characteristic towns in industrial areas, tourist scenic spots, beautiful villages, communities, etc. Therefore, the Financial and Economic Committee of the Henan Provincial People's Congress suggested that the provincial government establish a standardized mechanism for correcting deviations and strengthen supervision and inspection of some deviations that appear in a tendency, such as obvious tendencies toward real estate, excessive risks, and the non-integration of production and town.

"In some places, characteristic towns are even regarded as enclosure artifacts." A professor at Henan University of Economics and Law said that because some places have special policies for the way of obtaining land in characteristic towns, they do not even need to go through "bidding, auctioning and listing", which reduces the cost of obtaining land for real estate developers, so some real estate companies even sign special towns as a new way to increase land reserves. In this way, characteristic towns will eventually become a means for some local governments to pursue inflated political performance and inflated fiscal revenues, and even become a tool for some real estate developers to frantically encircle land again.

Xinhua News Agency also pointed out in a commentary that the central government has repeatedly ordered and repeatedly demanded that the "real estate" of characteristic towns be strictly prevented, but in some places, real estate projects have become the absolute protagonists in the construction of characteristic towns. In the name of "characteristic town", the fact that the real estate project "enclosure" has also made the characteristic town deviate from the original intention of construction.

At the end of 2018, the Luoyang Intermediate People's Court hung up a real estate auction announcement, and some of the residential real estate projects under construction in Building 2, Building 5 and Building 6 of "Seravi Huahai Town" were publicly auctioned, involving a total of 70 residential units, with a total area of 11928.86 square meters and an appraisal price of 32.26 million yuan. However, after successive auctions, none of these assets were bid.

After the hustle and bustle, the "Flower Sea Town" only has a chicken feather left.