It's been said that even China's population of 1.4 billion couldn't fill all the empty homes. Many are high-rise apartments in gleaming new financial districts that initially failed to take off.

China’s long economic boom famously left it dotted with an overbuilt landscape of empty apartment towers and decrepit shopping malls. Tracking these “ghost cities” has become a fixation of economists ...

Overbuilding, and a streak of bad luck, have left China’s real-estate developers in the red. Photo: Adam Adada How closely is demand for $3,000 handbags tied to home prices in China? Quite closely, it ...