A red card from Roofinder.com doesn’t mean a sending-off:quite the opposite, it could be your passport to a dream home. Roofinder distributes its red, yellow, green and blue advertising cards in Sanlitun and Chaoyang Park bars, and around 1000 get picked up just in 2 or 3 days. The site appeals instantly to foreigners who are looking for a place to live and don’t relish the prospect of traipsing around town with an unhelpful estate agent. The idea came to Roofinder CEO Kathy FAN when she heard about the problems her foreign friends were experiencing. "I thought about starting a website you could search according to your requirements, which could save you a lot of time," she says. Kathy was working for a German import/export company where she aquired experience on the internet. She and webmaster Bill Sun lanched Roofinder in May 1999. Give Roofinder’s "Smart mail" service a set of criteria--such as the amount of rent you want to pay, the district you’d like to live in and the number of bedrooms you are looking for--and it will automatically contact you whenever a property becomes available that fits the bill. The site’s other feathers include classified ads and objective first-hand information about different residential areas, so you don’t have to rely on an estate agent’s glossy propaganda. Slow speed is a problem that Roofinder is striving to overcome. "Most people are not patient enough to wait more than 20 senconds to download a page", Kathy says. "Our technitian tries to solve this problem by making the pictures small." Roofinder is exclusively aimed at expats who are looking for homes in the areas designated for foreigners, but Kathy looks forward to the day when the law will change, allowing foreigners to live in local housing. That way they’ll learn more about China, she thinks. "Every foreigner knows the internet and use it very often," she says. Not that many Chinese people know the internet. It’s very difficult to get them to do business over the internet. But I think in five years the internet will be just as common as TV or telephone. 本文十月份发表在BEIJING JOURNAL上