Bricks and Mortar | Sex shop owner's insights stimulate debate among China's developers
Wake up call from sex shop owner has mainland property developers worried about the future
Ma Jiajia has suddenly become a famous - albeit controversial - figure in the mainland property market.
Born in the 1990s, she is the chief executive of a company that runs sex shops.
Ma was recently invited by China Vanke, the country's biggest home builder by sales revenue, to deliver a two-hour talk in which she claimed that her generation does not buy homes.
If that is true, what will become of the mainland's housing market, with prices now at record highs and far beyond the reach of middle-income families?
That outlook obviously frightened some developers, who called her "an alien".
But others embraced the challenges Ma threw down: developers need to try out different sales and marketing strategies that cater to a generation whose life is becoming increasingly redefined by the internet and the technology revolution.
The possibility of a game changer … is playing on the nerves of mainland developers