Can selling houses on the Internet spur a trillion-scale market innovation?
■Reporter Li Ye Qi Yingpu
During the "Double 11" period this year, "Tmall Haofang", which put 800,000 units across the country into the e-commerce shopping cart, continued to "open in the cloud" on "Double 12", with real estate companies such as Country Garden, Zhongnan Land, and Peacock City joining.
According to its latest data, in the previous "Double 11", the source of customers attracted by the "Tmall Haofang" has been converted into 26,000 new houses nationwide for verification and cancellation.
In the eyes of the outside world, the emergence of Ali's "Tmall Haofang" is a challenge to the real estate transaction service platform "Shell Search", which was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in August this year.
The latter was born out of Lianjia, a real estate agency. As of 16:00 on December 14 EST, its market value has exceeded 77.5 billion U.S. dollars. It ranks among the top five Chinese stocks on the three major US stock exchanges, second only to Alibaba, Pinduoduo, JD, China Mobile.
At the same time, Internet companies lacking real estate experience, such as ByteDance, JD.com, and Suning, have also begun to cross-border layouts, and the track of Internet house selling is already crowded.
The reporter interviewed more than a dozen passers-by at random, and they all said that if you don't go to the sales office to find out the situation, they will never place an order through the screen.
So, this round of “fairy fights” of Internet house selling is just repeating the old way of digitizing housing information and moving online, or is it the prelude to the self-renovation of the trillion-scale real estate market?
Selling a house or marketing?
The current Internet house selling platform, only marketing and displaying on the Internet, is at the forefront of the house selling link
"Tmall Haofang" stepped on the rhythm of "Double 11" and "Double 12".
Since November this year, 800,000 real houses have been put on the shelves, covering more than 3,000 real estates in more than 200 cities across the country, and even a discount of up to 50% has been offered.
The reporter opened the Taobao App and entered the "Tmall Haofang" page, and found more than 70 local real estates in Shanghai, including commercial housing and office buildings.
These projects are mainly distributed in the suburbs of Fengxian, Jinshan, Songjiang, etc. Generally speaking, the preferential strength is not large. About one-seventh of the real estates that clearly indicate the discount, the discount amount is mostly 10,000 to 20,000 yuan, not to mention the "5" in the promotion. Discounted room” and “free room delivery”.
The highest discounted project comes from the "Shanghai China International Exhibition Vanke Center". The unit for sale is an office area with a construction area of more than 500 square meters. The price is 19.68 million yuan, which can be discounted by more than 4 million yuan.
In fact, in recent years, the profit margin of the real estate industry has become more and more limited, and the emergence of low-cost and preferential housing is not of universal significance.
Across the country, "Tmall Haofang" offers more preferential properties, mainly commercial projects and residential properties that are relatively difficult to sell. They are located in remote areas or have poor house sizes.
From the perspective of user experience, compared with the mainstream Internet transaction service platform that has been operating for many years, the newly built "Tmall Haofang" still has a gap in terms of rich information and user interaction.
The reporter clicked on the "Jingyunli" villa project on the Taobao App and found that the presentation information was the basic content, mainly showing the unit price, the type of units on sale, and the location.
On another mainstream platform, the information presented is obviously more diverse. In addition to basic information, it also includes real estate dynamics, surrounding facilities, netizens' comments, mortgage down payment consultation, etc., and user interaction is also stronger.
In fact, the current Internet selling platforms cannot actually sell houses. They only display marketing on the Internet and are at the forefront of the house selling link.
An industry insider commented that the current "Internet + real estate" sales model, compared to previous years, is nothing more than creating more online hotspots, introducing new marketing methods such as star live broadcasts, or adding 3D and VR technologies. The application has improved the efficiency of home buyers' viewing.
But in its essence, it only penetrated the port of online customer acquisition and introduction offline, and did not really enter the transaction link on the platform.
In general, today’s "Internet + real estate" sales model is more like a supplement to traditional offline house selling, mainly playing the role of online diversion and increasing conversion, while at the same time expanding the brand awareness of developers, and the direct effect of selling houses It remains to be further tested by the market.
Can the link get through?
E-commerce platforms don’t just want to sell a house, and a compliant agency qualification and financial service qualification are essential
New entrants such as "Tmall Haofang" want to do better real estate internet marketing, or do they have other plans?
The real estate transaction process is complex, involving multiple links such as loans and online signing, as well as taxation, banking, housing management and many other departments, and because of the huge subject, it is difficult to make decisions, realize online transactions, and even verify as quickly as other commodities on the e-commerce platform. "No reason to return within 7 days" after delivery.
Therefore, for many years, Internet giants have never dared to touch the real estate industry.
However, Ali intends to break through this time.
"Tmall Haofang" related person in charge Mu Yi revealed that the reason why Ali dared to try to enter the real estate industry that has been developing for decades is that there is still huge room for improvement in the industry's digital capabilities.
"Tmall Haofang" hopes that in addition to helping real estate companies to acquire customers online, it also hopes to rely on big data, blockchain, cloud computing and other technologies to explore more possibilities. "For example, in the future, contract signing, tax payment, and real estate certification will be realized online. After-market business such as decoration and property management."
Muyi said that "Tmall Haofang" has taken the first step during the "Double 12" period, testing the water jointly with Country Garden and Zhongnan Land, realizing online room selection and deposit.
This will prevent buyers from running errands repeatedly.
In the designated projects of these two real estate companies, check the house type and room number and add it to the shopping cart, and finally take a photo to pay the deposit, and consumers can lock their favorite housing online.
Once the offline subscription is successful, the subscription deposit will be converted into a deposit and transferred to the special pre-sale fund supervision account of the corresponding project.
It is understood that the online room selection and deposit payment had previously only made very sporadic breakthroughs in specific cities and specific platforms, and there is no platform that can realize a large-scale line running through the country.
The reason is that the real estate contract has a strong supervisory attribute and must be carried out in a designated supervisory account.
Generally speaking, every real estate company must establish a supervisory account before registering and filing a commercial housing pre-sale contract.
This supervision account is intervened by the government, banks, enterprises, and home buyers.
However, it is difficult to monitor the direction of money in the account online, because online must fully comply with the legal compliance supervision process of government departments and banks, and it must be clear that there are a lot of secured transactions at all levels, and ensure the security of the system. Stable and smooth, to achieve the uniqueness of the process, and absolutely avoid one room for two sales, which requires extremely high requirements for the basic capabilities of the Internet platform and blockchain technology.
From this point of view, the online house sale of "Tmall Haofang" is currently only a preliminary step to open up the entire chain of online house sale transactions.
Muyi said that "Tmall Haofang" strives to fully open up the digital transaction link next year, and realize that transactions, loans, online signing, certificate processing, and tax payment can all be carried out online.
Some consumers also have hidden concerns.
In the past, the Internet platform was only a channel for the release of information on selling houses. If the e-commerce platform opens up the transaction link and starts a real house selling business, does it have the corresponding qualifications and who will supervise this emerging business?
In fact, e-commerce platforms don’t want to sell a house just because they want to sell a house. Compliant agency sales qualifications and financial service qualifications are essential.
How do real estate companies think?
Real estate companies can only take advantage of this flow and low commission bonuses for the time being.
But it does not rule out that Internet giants form a monopoly and reap high commissions
What do the real estate companies think about Internet companies entering the market to sell houses?
On the day of the establishment of "Tmall Haofang" on September 16, there were more than 60 real estate companies responsible for the platform, and the big screen on the scene said "Let the world have no hard-to-sell houses".
However, the real voice of real estate companies is that they finally have a platform that can be quickly sold, and the current fee is not high.
A relevant person in charge of a Shanghai state-owned real estate company said that the biggest difficulty in selling a house is to obtain customers, especially to obtain a sufficient number of customers with matching demand.
Relevant calculations show that 3% of the profits of housing enterprises and housing funds contributed to the acquisition of customers.
In addition, under the tone of "housing and housing, not speculation", the property market has generally stabilized.
In August of this year, the regulatory authorities issued new regulations to control the growth of interest-bearing debts of real estate companies and set "three red lines", that is, "the debt-to-asset ratio after excluding advance receipts is greater than 70%; the net debt ratio is greater than 100%; the cash short-term debt ratio is less than 1.0 times".
This signal also prompted real estate companies to pay more attention to reducing debt ratio.
At the same time, the flow and algorithm advantages of the Internet platform can help real estate companies to accurately acquire customers, so as to actively destock and withdraw funds through price concession promotion.
According to estimates, the conversion efficiency of online house selling and customer acquisition is significantly higher than that of ordinary house selling platforms, which can save real estate companies about 50% of customer acquisition costs.
In order to seize market share, "Tmall Haofang" used the customary method of huge subsidies, claiming to be backed by the Taobao platform that links 400 million families, and it will not make money in the next 3 years and only charge 3% of the service fee of the transaction commission. For many real estate companies, this is an attractive channel for acquiring customers.
However, the person in charge of marketing at a Shanghai real estate company can see that real estate companies can only take advantage of this flow of traffic and low commission dividends for the time being to accelerate the elimination, but it does not rule out that Internet giants will reap high commissions after they form a monopoly in the field of housing sales in the future. This is the same reason that the food delivery platform initially used subsidies to attract merchants to settle in. After the merchants become dependent on the platform, the commission will increase year by year."
Industry reminder
Explore in advance the introduction of regulatory measures to regulate online house sales
Avoid fake listings and price monopoly
Internet house selling circuit giants are fighting for hegemony. Who will be in the future?
From the perspective of industry insiders, real estate online service transactions are still in the developing stage, and it will be difficult for one company to become one in the future, and it is more likely that multiple platforms will develop the industry together.
Taking the two largest platforms currently on the market, "Tmall Haofang" and "Shell Finding Housing", both have their own advantages.
Unlike "Tmall Haofang", which aims to strengthen the Internet penetration rate of real estate transactions, "Shell Finding a House" emphasizes online and offline linkage.
The person in charge of "Shell Finding Housing" stated that with ACN (Agent Cooperation Network) as the core, "Shell Finding Housing" has linked 40,000 stores and 400,000 brokers.
Brokerage stores and brokers deeply embedded in the community are closer to home buyers, easier to understand the needs of home buyers, and can effectively introduce their own customer resources into marketing activities.
Such a model is also welcomed by the market to a certain extent.
In late September, "Shell Search for Housing" launched the one-month "National New House Festival". From the end of September to October 8, the number of new houses purchased through the New House Festival exceeded 1,000 in Hefei, Kunming, Qingdao, and Foshan. There are even more than 4000 sets in Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan, Zhengzhou and other places.
"Internet companies entering the real estate industry is a breakthrough attempt and an inevitable trend. The higher the gold content of the industry, the greater the motivation for capital inflow, and technological upgrades will also open a gap for entering the real estate industry with a high moat." Centaline Property (China) (Mainland) Vice President Liu Tianyang said frankly that traditional industries have a strong offline foundation and find suitable business models and online links to develop the second curve of corporate life. However, if they do not transform, they will be eliminated by the new business logic (model). It may be faster than ever.
Experts said that the long-term trend of selling houses on the Internet is mainly to meet the time efficiency needs of consumers. Through the empowerment of Internet big data, from the efficiency of front-end information flow to the continuation of back-end services on finance and decoration after the transaction. Under the Internet platform, the possibility and effect of realization are better, and efficiency can be improved in enterprises, governments and users.
Some people in the industry have also reminded that it is necessary for the regulatory authorities to pay attention to this emerging business, explore and introduce relevant regulatory measures in advance, regulate online house sales, and avoid false listings and price monopoly that disrupt the market.