My first trip to Shanghai to see Regalia for the first time was in March 1996. Three representatives of Golden Horse were at the airport to receive me and another buyer. The next day we took a taxi from our hotel to The Regalia. We were however not very impressed by the Shanghai apartment because it was not as grand as the building shown in the brochure. Neither were we happy with the fittings in the Shanghai apartments as there were tiny cracks in the main door, the parquet flooring was poorly polished and the cables of the air-conditioners were glaringly exposed. Further inspection of the building revealed that the common area facilities such as the basement carpark, the covered swimming pool, the karaoke lounge and the gym were still under construction! How could we rent out our units when these facilities were not ready? And the management insisted that we owners had to pay the monthly maintenance fee of RMB610.00 (about S$110) even when these common facilities were not ready!
We had suspected for some time that Golden Horse was in financial trouble soon after the lunar new year party. The banks in China had stopped lending money on easy terms to property developers because they had already built too many condos. With the source of money drying up, these developers with several mega projects half completed could hardly carry on. Unfortunately for the buyers of Regalia, only about three quarters the project had been completed. That was why the developer had to cut costs by reducing the work force and using poor-quality materials! We were really disappointed because we thought we had a good bargain.
You really have to believe the saying: Man proposes, God disposes.
Quietly Golden Horse branch office in Singapore closed down some time in the later part of 1997 or early 1998. Those of us who had paid for our properties with cash demanded that we be given the title deed. We were told that we had to ask the main officce in Shanghai to attend to any of our demands. We were very worried.
Another complaint of ours was that we had already paid the 6% stamp fee to the developer for prosessing the title deed. But when the govt had later reduced it to 3%, the developer took no action to refund us the extra 3% it had received from us. The excuse given was that they were short of monay and would try to refund us later. They were now playing "Taiji", an art of gently parrying with opponents.
Meanwhile I also faced the problem of finding a tenant for my Shanghai apartment. And the sooner I got one the better because, whether my Shanghai apartment was occupied or not, I had to pay the monthly maintenance fee of RMB610 (about 120 Sing dollars).
