It s completely new for Beijing, she said, pointing at the sleek glass storefronts and apartments rising into the sky.
Jianwai Soho is the second major Beijing property project undertaken by Ms Zhang and her husband, Pan shiyi, joint chief executive of Soho China. The first, called Soho New Town, was launched in 1998 and introduced clean, sleek apartment living to Beijing s rising middle class. It is nearing full occupancy.
Jianwai Soho rectifies some of the first project s faults Soho New Town s towers soar in the air with few shops or inviting spaces for casual chat.
It is all part of a push by the power couple to make money through quality design.
Apart from these two mammoth projects, Ms Zhang and Mr Pan are most famous for commissioning 12 well-known architects to build a series of houses near the Great Wall. The project, called the Commune by the Great Wall, may not have been a smashing commercial success, but it branded them as design visionaries and marked the first time a Chinese architectural project was invited to Europe s La Biennale di Venezia, the world s foremost art exhibition.
Now Soho China is focused on Jianwai Soho, which launched at the end of October and has generated healthy pro-sales even with just a few buildings completed.
When we completed Soho New Town, we wanted to create a neighborhood, Ms Zhang said. This place could be very vibrant because it will be mixed and open to the streets.
She said Beijing s city planners have spent too much time worrying about constructing the tallest buildings or widest streets without regard to good design. People are tired of mass and collectivism. Areas like Hou Hai and Sanlitun (two popular Beijing bar areas) have intimacy which attracts so many people. Jianwai Soho is likewise designed to be approachable.
Ms Zhang emigrated to Hong Kong from China in the early 1980s and as a teenager worked in local factories for five years, before going abroad to study at Sussex and Cambridge universities in the UK. There she earned a Master s in development economics and worked on Wall Street in the early 1990s, helping both Goldman Sachs and Traveler s Group enter China. She met Mr Pan on a sales call to his company back in 1994. The two married a year later.
Jianwai Soho is being constructed on the site of Beijing s largest machine tool factory, which had fallen on hard times. Soho China paid the factory managers a relocation fee in 1996 and then negotiated to buy the land from the local government.
The Soho concept came about during the dotcom boom. Back in 1999, everybody was doing information technology companies, Ms Zhang remembered. People were staying home and dressing casually. We decided there should be something catering to these people. The focus was on neutral space and being flexible, where you could have a gallery next to a tea house next to a trading company.
Soho New Town is 30 per cent residential and 70 per cent business. When completed in 2005, Jianwai Soho will consist of 28 buildings and 300 retail shops over 700,000 square meters.
The flats are being sold at about 14,000 yuan (HK$13,000) per square meter, higher than the average of 10,000 per square meter at Soho New Town, There is still plenty of money to be made in Beijing s property marker despite Ms Zhang s belief that rents have room to fall. Soho is renting the shops at about US$40 per square meter, less than half the price of some better-known retail space in the vicinity.
Rents still have room to come down because prices have been pretty flat over the past five years, but with the increasing supply there is pressure for prices to decline, she said.
There has been a lot of talk about Soho China coming to market. The company previously cancelled a listing scheduled for New York and Hong Kong.
While Ms Zhang is reluctant to comment in detail, given regulations governing initial public offerings, she ventures that now is not the time to push Beijing property companies on investors.
Real estate developments around the world have different business models, she said. In Hong Kong, the value of land is so high, the focus is on getting land. Here in China, it s a different story. Companies like us we re producers, selling apartments like consumer goods this is not an asset game, this a marketing game.
Biography
Zhang Xin holds a Master s degree in development economics from Cambridge University. She worked for Goldman Sachs and Traveler s group on Wall Street before returning to her home town, Beijing, to start her own real estate company with her husband, Pan Shiyi.
Together, Ms Zhang and Mr Pan have developed four projects: Soho New Town, BoAo Canal Village, Jianwai Soho and the Commune by the Great Wall. The last is a contemporary museum of private houses that was designed by 12 Asian architects and recognized as an award-winning project at last year s Venice Biennale.
Ms Zhang was awarded a special prize, the Silver Lion, at the Venice Biennale for her role as a patron of architecture . It was the first time in the history of the awards that a Chinese project was invited to participate, and also the first time that a Biennale prize was awarded to someone other than an architect or artist.
