In 2016, the flamboyant Baidu and the reserved Tencent took the rare step of investing in a company at the same time.
In 2017, it was also a rare simultaneous investment by the brawler Sunac China and the stalwart Vanke.
The company favored by the giants is called Lianjia.
After the 19th National Congress, whether the housing price, like the future, will follow the law of will rise after the meeting, is still uncertain, no one can say. But one thing is certain: second-hand housing transactions in China's first-tier cities and strong second-tier cities outnumber new homes, and the end of the "frontier" era of real estate is entering the second half - the era of inventory housing.
In 2016, the total value of commercial housing transactions in China reached 11 trillion yuan. According to Lianjia's statistics, second-hand housing transactions accounted for 41 percent of all transactions nationwide, and more than 70 percent in Beijing and Shanghai.
The real estate agency will become A trillion-level market, and Homelink, as the leader, has been estimated to be worth 40 billion to 50 billion yuan according to the investment amount and proportion of several giants. If it is an A-share IPO, it is estimated to be more than 100 billion yuan.
Back ten years ago, Lianjia, 5I5J, Zhongda Henderson, Centaline Property, 21st Century Real Estate and other intermediaries were all thriving. Why, after ten years, the other partners fell behind one after another, leaving Lianjia alone?
Brick-and-mortar stores with Internet genes?
At the end of October, the first phase of the forum was hosted by i Place and co-organized by Yunxuan Zhongtong and Consonant International. In the high-end salon with the theme of "New Consumption Reform Strategy: Digital Operation", the methods and paths of digital operation of enterprises in the new consumption era were focused and discussed. With the heat of the 19th National Congress, everyone talked about this wonderful thing in China's real estate market.
In the view of Wang Hanchao, chairman of i in Place, the success of Lianjia is inevitable. Because Homelink's backend architecture is data-driven, its "real estate dictionary" database is very detailed. On this basis, second-hand housing, rental and thereafter decoration, home, financial extension services can be well linked, for investors and related parties, imagination space is huge.
In short, "This is a real estate agency with Internet genes."
In the pre-Internet era, a bricks-and-mortar intermediary company filled with stores on the street, has Internet genes?
The password to Homelink
This is indeed the case.
In the real estate agency industry, Homelink has always been a strange thing, because it insisted on direct stores and did not open any franchise stores from the beginning of its establishment, so as to realize strong control and ensure service quality. In China's rapid development of the real estate market, such insistence was seen as unwise at that time - the market is expanding rapidly, hurry to use the way to seize territory ah!
However, the real estate intermediary industry is highly dependent on salesman, and the front-line salesman of this industry liquidity is large, and the core of the intermediary business is information, people go, information is gone, and later to start again, not only leads to low efficiency of operation, uneven service quality, people also take away information and customers, or take to the rival, or independent business, inside and outside, Companies are being hit twice hard.
Afterwards, it turns out that a large number of agents who do join all make bad companies.
However, the decision not to join Lianjia at that time was cruel. Because the direct marketing system to expand, we must have a strong background IT system, convenient chain store service industrialization, standardization. And IT systems at that time were expensive.
But none of that stopped Lianjia. After reaching a certain scale, Lianjia invested heavily and introduced IBM's IT systems and services.
From that day on, all Lianjia salesmen, whether they made a phone call to the landlord or showed the house to the customer, had to input the relevant information into the system. The information collection of the house and the customer was very complete. Whether it was renting or buying a house, the customer could get through the data from the initial contact, consultation and transaction to the later information follow-up. For each house and each customer has realized the fine file management.
As a result, more than ten years ago, the three Beijing housing agency companies started together, only the highly information-based Homelink became a giant, the other two gradually lagged behind.
After more than ten years of development, Homelink's system has been far ahead of the peers.
By how much?
In 2014, Internet intermediaries led by Aiya Jiya expanded frantically, hoping to become China's Redfin(the largest real estate data software company and trading platform in the United States) to dominate the world through online-to-offline O2O. Aiya Yoshiya raised money four times a year at a valuation of more than $1 billion, and the capital markets recognized it. However, after the completion of Homelink's big data system, its APP and website traffic soared, more than all its rivals combined.
When the cash war subsided, it turned out that only Lianjia had actually completed O2O and become a vertically integrated behemoth, better than Redfin.
Now, the basic Homelink system has been considered platform level, if Homelink wants, it can be opened to the whole industry at any time. So much so that Lianjia's investors say that its core competitiveness lies in its complete O2O framework.
Moreover, Homelinks' emphasis on digital operation makes it not recruit the so-called experienced intermediary personnel like its peers, but basically stick to recruiting a blank SLATE of young people and cultivating them by themselves (except for its aggressive expansion in the past two years). You know, the business in this industry is sophisticated, not only difficult to manage, but also often black customers.
How to deal with a blank SLATE without experience?
And that's where the system comes in. All good companies have a mechanism of "letting ordinary people make extraordinary achievements", and this mechanism of Lianjia is built on the set of digital operation IT system.
You can also be Lianjia
This case let salon scene of Consonant International chairman Zhao Ming very emotional. He still remembers how complete and precise customer records were at the multinational farming and animal husbandry company he worked for 20 years ago, while customer records are still a mess at the big feed companies in China today. "Customer-centric" has been proposed for many years, but when it comes to the actual level, there is often no data and information support, and it is impossible to truly understand the customer. All the strategies and countermeasures are just a matter of thinking, without value.
In fact, complete and accurate enterprise data is an extremely valuable asset for a company, even the ultimate chip to maintain a competitive advantage during the company's rise. Many bosses know the benefits of digital operation, but the tens of millions of software purchase cost prevents most enterprises from doing so. Only visionary entrepreneurs like Lianjia Zuohui will be determined to do this.
But at the salon, Wang Hanchao told the audience that in today's China, the threshold of digital operation has been greatly lowered. Even a small enterprise can start its own digital operation.
In the past, it was expensive for enterprises to customize their own digital platforms. A set of software often cost hundreds of thousands of millions, and large and medium-sized enterprises needed tens of millions, and it was impossible to iterate quickly. A company's problems change, a system may not work soon, it must be re-customized, and it can be costly for a software company to send a few engineers into the company for a few months to write code.
Today, the software industry has evolved to the saas stage, which provides a way for enterprises to operate digitally. To solve the problem that enterprise digital operation should take into account professionalism, systematization and use cost, saas moves the software that needs to be installed on enterprise server to the cloud, just like we use any mobile phone APP today. Enterprise employees only need to download a computer or mobile APP to use the Internet.
What's important is that companies don't have to buy their own expensive servers, don't have to buy software all at once, just pay a monthly fee.
The cost reduction is one of the key reasons why more and more enterprises are using saas platforms.
The full-line operation of Saas platform enables full-line data process to be opened up, which can record customer information accurately and completely to the maximum extent and establish sophisticated customer files.
The saas platform represented by iPlace has promoted digitalization from the most basic OA and finance to business, management, customer acquisition and transaction related to the life of enterprises, and built a complete digital operation system, from which many enterprises have enjoyed the benefits.
Of course, the transformation of digital operation of traditional enterprises cannot be accomplished overnight. Lianjia has accumulated more than 5 years' experience in data and digital operation to reach today's stage. Many user enterprises in place also start with a few key modules, and then gradually expand to all aspects of the enterprise. Their message: Use it first.
In July this year, i was successfully listed on the New Third Board. Its industrial advantages of deep digitization operation and clear business model have been recognized by the capital market, so whether it will be favored by enterprises in the future, let us wait and see! After all, the traditional has come to an end, digital operation is the general trend, in this wave of stormy waves how to achieve self-rescue ashore is the most urgent proposition for enterprises.
