After the Spring Festival, people who had struggled to return to their hometowns for the holiday began heading back to work, and life gradually returned to normal.
However, those who had bought houses started to notice that prices had plummeted dramatically, never to recover to their previous levels.
Headlines were soon filled with stories of mortgage defaults, deep-discount sales, and real estate agencies closing up shop and disappearing.
In the central urban areas, the drop in housing prices was not significant, especially for large luxury homes, some of which even continued to rise in value. Still, a few properties saw substantial price reductions.
The disaster zone was outside the city center, where the general drop in housing prices after the New Year exceeded thirty percent, with some areas experiencing drops of over fifty or even sixty percent.
