A BEIJING woman was found to have married and divorced three times in five months to help non-residents get round house buying restrictions, the capital's housing authority said after an investigation into two real estate agencies.
The agencies are suspected of involvement in 17 house purchases in which "fake" marriages played a part.
In one case, Wang Fang, a former staff member with one of the agencies, had married three out-of-towners, aged between 20 and 60, in succession. All her husbands had applied to buy a house in Beijing, documents showed.
The marriage scam emerged shortly after a string of curbs were introduced to cool the property market.
In February 2011, Beijing authorities stipulated that non-natives living in Beijing could only buy a house if they had paid social insurance or income tax for at least five years.
However, if they have married Beijing natives, they would also be regarded as natives and able to own two houses.
People like Wang could earn 30,000 (US$4,890) to 50,000 yuan per marriage, yesterday's Beijing News reported.
Some real estate agencies solicited customers by helping to find wives or husbands for them, the newspaper said.
Housing officials said that if agencies are found to be involved in arranging marriages for the purpose of house purchase, such purchases would be rejected by the city's online contract system.
The system, where buyers and sellers register their details online, has been introduced to prevent swindles in which agencies would sell a house to more than one buyer.
The system will alert officials if an identification number is used to apply for house purchase with more than three other different ID numbers.
Checking documents for the past two years, the Beijing Commission of Housing and Urban-Rural Development found nearly 50 "fake" wives and husbands, or people who had married for the sole purpose of helping an out-of-towner buy a house in the capital.
The newspaper said that the marriages had exposed a loophole in the country's property control policies.
It said experts were suggesting that housing management authorities revise the rules to take more account of buyers who had been married or divorced a number of times.
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