What started five years ago as a small service (printed books) for expats in China, grew exponentially with the launch of the Applications in June 2011.

It allows foreigners to alleviate communication issues with local cabbies as well as overcome language barriers in all Chinese key cities.

Taxi-Book – Handy city guides for all key Chinese cities:
• know your position + help you find your destination
• know thousands of key locations
• different search functions
• speak Chinese for you!
• 10 handy categories
• frequently updated
• GPS

With 34 Chinese cities launched in the App store and Android version/ worldwide development in progress, we are targeting potential investors and custom made apps.

We are currently talking to KLM & Shangri-La, please check our presentation down below.

Hope we can help your company reach a new level of customer service and make you clients feel at home, worldwide!

Feel free to contact our GM Dieter (13730871837/ info@taxi-book.com) if any questions

Your destination, our drive!

KLM Taxi-Book Application – Branding and customization options for corporations- –

- Close to Chencheng residence, one of five prime presidential sites

- Combination of urban and natural river view

Please see the following project profiles for more information
E-mail address: marketing1@maxxelli.net
Tel: 4000 150 600

City Heights Introduction _ENG_ –

Chongqing and Shanghai are the first two cities in China to implement the trial tax.

“Fewer people have come to our sales office since the second half of last year, and everyone has asked if the houses we sell will be taxed or not,” said a property consultant, surnamed Lin,whose office is located in Chongqing’s Longtousi Park around which high-end apartment blocks are clustered.

“The gloomy housing market is getting even worse, and we cannot sell 10 houses a month. If the situation deteriorates further, I’m afraid that my colleagues and I will lose our jobs,” said Lin.

According to research conducted by Chongqing Municipal Land Resources and Housing Administrative Bureau, the number of people who visited sales offices in high-end housing areas has recently dropped 30 percent to 50 percent, and considerable number of homebuyers changed their minds to buy smaller-sized or more modestly-styled homes.

Statistics show that from January 28 to November 30, the sale of high-end housing in Chongqing plunged to 700,000 square meters, 4.1 percent lower than that of 2010.

“The implementation of the tax restricted the development of the high-level housing market, and then curbed the prices of this kind of housing,” said Wen Xing, an official of Chongqing Municipal Land Resources and Housing Administrative Bureau.

The property tax also rationalized the structure of the commercial housing, cutting the rate of large-sized houses and increasing mid- and small-sized houses supplies, thus more ordinary people can now afford a home, Wen said.

Chongqing began to tax all villas as well as new apartments priced at least two times the average price of all newly-built homes last year.

The annual tax rates are 0.5 percent of the transaction prices for villas and apartments priced less than three times the average price, 1 percent for those priced three to four times the average and 1.2 percent for those priced more than four times the average.

For a family, the first 180 square meters for villas and first 100 square meters for high-end apartments are exempted from tax, according to the regulation.

For non-permanent residents who don’t work or run companies in Chongqing, their second homes will be taxed at 0.5 percent regardless of the prices.

A taxpayer surnamed Luo has a villa in Jiulongpo district, covering 250 square meters. Luo said he must pay 2,000 Yuan ($315) in tax for the excessive 70 square meters of his villa each year.

“I hope the housing tax won’t be too high, as my family won’t be able to bear the burden,” said Luo.

The owners of 8,563 high-end houses paid more than 90 million Yuan ($14.2 million) in taxes10 months after the implementation of the trial tax, said He Zhiming, vice president of Chongqing Finance Bureau.

All the property tax revenue will be used for the construction and maintenance of public rental housing in Chongqing, He said.

The levy is designed to help regulate income distribution and promote social equality, and guide reasonable housing consumption for land saving and intensive use, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of Finance, the State Administration of Taxation and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

Chongqing government built 110,000 units of public rental houses in 2011, accommodating more than 300,000 urban low-income earners, including migrant workers and graduates who had failed to find a job.

Regulations stipulate that a tenant can buy his rented apartment after five years of renting at the price based on the apartment’s construction cost — much lower than the prices of commercial housing.

Source: China Daily

The cash flow of property developers will be further squeezed as the credit policies relating to them remain tight and most of their financing channels, such as trust and overseas financing products, will come due this year.

According to Guotai Junan Securities Co Ltd, real estate trust products valued at 175.8 billion Yuan ($28 billion) will come due this year, with the peak occurring in July.

Ye Chengyu, director of investment at the real estate consultancy Cushman & Wakefield Inc, said that 2012 will be a year of property developer M&A, because they will face a tightened cash flow of unprecedented proportions.

“Though domestic players will still dominate the investment market this year, more deals involving international investors are expected,” said Ye from Cushman & Wakefield.

According to Cushman & Wakefield, published en-bloc sales in Beijing hit $3.63 billion in 2011, down 13 percent from the previous year. Chinese institutional investors dominated the marketing terms of sources of capital, with 83 percent compared with 60 percent in 2010.

However, the situation in Shanghai was the reverse: published en-bloc deals totaled $5.25billion last year, up 9.9 percent from 2010. Foreign institutional investors accounted for 51.2percent of the capital sources, according to statistics from Cushman & Wakefield.

“Shanghai remained the most-favored city by international investors, because the market is more mature and there are more tradable assets for global investors,” said Ye.

Frank Marriott, senior director of Savills Real Estate Capital (Asia-Pacific), said the office markets in Beijing and Shanghai are still the favorites for international institutional investors, especially core real estate funds that prefer relatively lower risks.

“However, there are few investment opportunities for international funds in these two office markets because the supply is limited and competition is fierce,” said Marriott. “Opportunist international funds are looking at the residential sector, seeking opportunities in second-tier cities with cash-strapped property developers.”

Though there has been a capital outflow since October, Chris Brooke, president and CEO of CB Richard Ellis Asia, part of the CB Richard Ellis Group Inc., international investors still have a strong interest in the Chinese property market.

“Some international funds did sell their projects in China, but the major reason for that was that their investment period had come due, rather than any pessimism about the country’s real-estate sector,” said Brooke.

Source: China Daily

Container transport will be authorized for the Yunkunmianyue international railway, which begins in Chongqing and runs through the provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan and the countries of Myanmar and Vietnam before ending at the Indian Ocean, according to Ma Zhongyuan, head of Chongqing’s customs office.

Ma said the railway’s container shipments will facilitate exports from Chongqing and west China to ASEAN member countries.

Another railway linking Chongqing with the city of Duisburg in Germany will be extended to the port city of Antwerp in Belgium, shortening the time it takes to ship goods from Chongqing to Belgium to about 16 days, 20 days less than the time on sea route, according to Ma.

China and Belgium also agreed to simplify custom inspection procedures, allowing goods exported from Belgium to China to go through just a single inspection in Belgium, Ma said.

The Chongqing municipal government has constructed multiple foreign trade ports and channels in recent years. The growth of the region’s foreign trade value, foreign investment and overseas investment rank first among the country’s provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities.

Source: China Daily

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tel: (86) 4000 150 600
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Hot Properties Xi’an February 2012

This is having a big impact on China’s local governments. They carry out over four-fifths of the country’s public spending, but pocket only half of the taxes. To help make up the difference, they rely on expropriating land from farmers and flogging it to bullish property developers. But as developers struggle, land sales are dwindling. As a result, local-government revenue is drying up. Popular resentment, meanwhile, is not. In Wukan, in the southern province of Guangdong, aggrieved villagers rose up in December against land-grabbing officials, chasing the local party chief away.

In other parts of the world local governments raise revenues by taxing homes based on something like their market value. In China taxing property is a touchy subject. The government had tried imposing a variety of levies on the sale, size and historical cost of property, but none on the market value of homes. That changed a year ago, when Chongqing and Shanghai, two giant cities, introduced a pilot tax on some up market homes. The tax was largely symbolic, levied at low rates on a few thousand homes in each city. But it nonetheless set a precedent. China should now broaden that tax to as many properties as possible, in cities across the country.

For local governments a fully fledged property tax would provide a stable source of revenue. Unlike workers or businesspeople, homes cannot up sticks and leave. A property tax raises revenue year after year, in contrast to a land lease, which can be sold only once. What’s more, such taxes allow local authorities to capture some of the value they create: as they invest in local amenities, property values rise, and so do the taxes they are able to collect.

Home truths

A property tax could also temper the wild swings in China’s housing market. A recurring levy would make it costlier to buy and hold a second or third home as a speculative bet on rising prices. That would force some absentee homeowners to sell their vacant flats or rent them to the many citizens priced out of the market. Some economists believe that the light taxation of land in Japan contributed to its ruinous asset-price bubble in the 1980s.

A property tax would by no means be easy to implement in China. It would require homes to be registered, title to be clear and the appraisal of property values to be credible. But similar obstacles have been overcome in other developing economies, including many cities in India.

Under Chairman Mao, taxes on private property all but vanished along with private property itself. Today’s Chinese set no store by the old socialist doctrine that “property is theft”. But many urban Chinese now think of taxation that way. They feel, with some justification, that they already pay too much to a state that provides too little.

This antipathy is not lost on China’s local governments. They are wary of angering the urban middle class, who own their own homes, and the city elites (including party officials and their families), who usually own several. So they continue to cause anger by throwing rural folk off their land. China must now act boldly to reform its taxation of property. Otherwise it will have to face the consequences of continued weak local-government finances and even more social unrest.

Source: Economist

According to statistics from investigate.800.com.cn, a real estate website based in Shaanxi, 935 units of commercial housing were sold last week in Xi’an, a decrease of 39.89 percent week-on-week. Property market turnover also dropped in the six districts in Xi’an, of which the new home transactions in the southern part of the city dropped the most, falling 63.88 percent week-on-week.

Industry experts found that the property market environment is likely to shift to a difficult place this year. Given the tight controls unveiled by the government and the banks, property buyers can hardly expect to see a funding catalyst in the upcoming quarter. On the other hand, with land prices likely to drop this year along with an increased supply of premium land, this will serve as a signal for being the right time for buyers to make land acquisitions over the next three years.

(Source: Global Times)

Additionally, thanks to concerted government efforts, issues such as crime have been decisively dealt with and crime-rates have fallen drastically making the city one of the safest in China.

Chongqing’s unique culture and situation in the heart of China make it a fascinating place from which to explore western China and beyond. With a history stretching back millennia, the municipality is home to a fascinating array of ancient sites and monuments whilst its stunning mountain scenery, home to rare species such as the golden monkey and the south China tiger, offer expats a range of outdoor activities. It is also a growing transport hub for central and western as western Sichuan or Tibet, city-breaks in Shanghai or Hong Kong, or holidays throughout the Asia-Pacific region.

Relocation services

For expat staff, relocating to a new city, and maybe city in a new country, can be an arduous and worrisome task. To smooth the transition, Maxxelli Real Estate provides a complete relocation service for foreign nationals.

Maxxelli has experienced multilingual staff, and an established track record of providing excellent professional assistance to employees of small, medium and large international companies.

Is it not strange: the little scissor used for cutting toenails is taken from you, also bottles of water and wines? But the cell-phone, which according to the cabin staff security lecture can tilt the entire airplane out of balance, is allowed to take on board.

So what happens if someone decides to call or SMS during take-off or landing? Are the airlines taking a chance by allowing cell-phones on board? Is the cell-phone really a security risk?

Cell-phones can in the first hand disrupt communication systems in the cockpit. In second hand it can affect the navigation system. It can mean danger, but a cell-phone that is switched on does not constitute a big enough security risk to motivate a prohibition to carry it in the cabin.
Since there are no accurate tests that can be made it is hard to know how much the cell-phone might cause disruptions. So why do you have to switch of the cell-phone during take-off and landing? An overall conclusion can be put like this:

“There are reports which prove that cell-phone usage does NOT cause disruption in aviation systems, but there are reports that have shown it might be so. “

Another perspective is that during take-off and landing radio beacons are used to secure the aircrafts position in relation to the landing strip. If radio-active equipment disrupt the sensitive receivers on the plane, manual and visual methods must be used, which increases the risk of danger during bad sight and sudden events.