Kuaishou Byte makes real estate, how much dividends can you eat?

  Tech Planet (WeChat ID: tech618)

Text | Zhai Yuanyuan

Cover source | Figureworm Creative

There is no shortage of spoilers in the real estate track, following the last round of Ali, JD.com, and Byte Xingxingli entering the real estate business, the short video platform Kuaishou also joined the ranks of selling houses last year, and after a half-year exploration period, handed over a report card to the outside world: 10 billion GTV (total transaction value).

What is the concept of 10 billion GTV? In 2022, the annual GDP of the real estate industry in the mainland will be 7,382.1 billion yuan, and the annual sales of commercial housing will be 13.33 trillion yuan. The head Internet real estate intermediary platform Shell is looking for houses, and the total GTV (turnover) in 2021 is 3.85 trillion yuan. Tmall has set a goal in 2020 to achieve an annual transaction size (GTV) of more than 2 trillion yuan in the next three years. In contrast, Kuaishou's real estate business has just started.

Kuaishou enters the real estate business is easy to understand, and the real estate category, like other categories, is only one of the many vertical businesses on the platform. If users have live shopping needs, they will also have the need to buy and rent houses, and the platform just complements the corresponding functions.

But the problem is that most of the spoilers of the previous round have already returned. An employee of Tmall Haofang's new housing business group in a city told Tech Planet that the company shrank its overall scale last year and closed stores in cities such as Shandong, and the company's previous 20,000-30,000 employees were almost half optimized last year. Jingdong real estate business, did not set off any big splash, Jingdong real estate platform, users can choose the number of self-operated listings are also limited, its public account latest update stopped at the end of December last year. The business development of Byte's Xingxingli is also full of twists and turns, and last year the media broke the news of layoffs and the closure of the new housing business.

However, Rao is so, and the latecomers are still full of ambition for the real estate business as challengers. Kuaishou Real Estate business aggressively recruits anchors and developers and provides platform training; In terms of bytes, Tech Planet recently exclusively reported that Xingxingli created the offline store brand of "Qiuhe Real Estate" after "wheat real estate", and established more than a dozen real estate brokerage companies in one go.

Internet giants have followed suit, and a new round of house selling competition between Kuaishou and Byte has started again. Can the short video platform that reconstructs the competition pattern in e-commerce and other fields work through? Can I get dividends again?

Byte online and offline go hand in hand

Real estate is a mass consumer product, and the user decision-making link is particularly long, from viewing to final transaction. Although the real estate market is showing signs of recovery, due to the sluggish market conditions in the past two years, coupled with the contraction of consumers' spending power and desire in the post-epidemic era, real estate transactions are not so easy as imagined.

Bytes, which entered the real estate business earlier, have completely experienced a real estate downturn.

Formerly known as Today's Headline Real Estate Channel, Happiness was founded in 2018. In 2020, Shell will be listed, and the annual GTV of the stock housing business will reach RMB 1.94 trillion. The success of Shell has made other companies see the broad prospects of the real estate business, and Ali, JD.com, and Byte have all entered the real estate business this year.

Xingxingli initially benchmarked both shells and 58 Anju customers, doing both new house business and second-hand house business. The CEO is Wang Xiao, reporting to Zhang Lidong, vice president of Byte.

The new housing business is easier to cut into, an insider of Shell revealed to Tech Planet, because this business model is to attract customers to developers, and after the transaction is successful, the platform obtains a share of the commission part, and the path is relatively short. Unlike second-hand housing, the core scene is offline, each listing belongs to non-standard products, you need to verify the listing, take a look, there are certain barriers in the industry.

The second-hand housing business model in Xingxingli is to sell port traffic, the same as 58.com Anjuke, CPT business, sell to brokers to use the network port, brokers can publish housing information on it, the platform earns port traffic fees. Zhang Wei, a former employee of Xingxingli, revealed to Tech Planet that even if the second-hand housing business is not profitable, the loss is not large, and it is almost a personnel development cost. There are not many people in happiness, and the ratio to settlers is about 1:10.

In April 2020, in order to accelerate the speed of expansion, Xingxingli borrowed from the 58.com residential customer model to carry out channel business. Zhang Wei said that in 2020, the second-hand housing business in Xingxingli has been launched for more than a year, and the first-tier cities and second-tier cities have been covered, and the sinking cities below the second-tier cities are still in the pioneering period. To do business in a small city, the direct operation method is relatively slow, and it will be faster to recruit agents. Therefore, the subordinate department of Xingxingli second-hand housing learned from 58.com to settle in the city, carry out business expansion, and launch channel business.

However, in the end, the completion of the channel business was not ideal, and the department only recruited a dozen investors, and the effect was not obvious. An agent of a city of Happiness CPT revealed to Tech Planet that the channel business in Happiness lasted less than 2 years and was directly shut down at the end of 2021.

From new houses to second-hand houses, and then to downstream home decoration, from online to offline, the acquisition of wheat field real estate in Fuzhou, Fujian, Xingxingli continues to expand its business boundaries. In 2021, Byte split Happiness and sought to introduce external financing for the latter. However, the entire real estate industry entered a downward cycle, and the new housing business could not see profit prospects, and Xingxingli had to withdraw from the city and lay off employees. In 2022, the new housing business in Xingxingli continued to contract, and only one urban new housing business in Beijing was retained.

The consultant of the new house in Xingxingli told Tech Planet that at present, Xingxingli only does new housing business in Beijing, with a team of 50-60 people and two branch groups. The new housing business is to advertise developers, not intermediary companies, and there are no offline stores. The advantage in happiness is that there will be some people who do not have listings, and then there will be additional discounts for individual properties and so on.

Kuaishou targets new homes, with a commission rate of 2%-3%

Byte and Kuaishou, one tries to "make a miracle", and the other is still in the light mode exploration period.

The online and offline collaboration strategy in Happiness continues, and the layout of offline scenes is expanding. A shell insider revealed to Tech Planet that last year I heard that Xingxingli launched "Qiuhe Real Estate" in addition to the wheat real estate brand, and Xingxingli seems to be building an offline real estate business brand matrix. The subsidy is also very large, "a store subsidy amount is hundreds of thousands of yuan, three or two years may not be able to return the cost." ”

Unlike Byte, Kuaishou Real Estate business model is still relatively light, mainly starting from the new housing business.

Kuaishou officially established Kuaishou Ideal Home Real Estate Business Center in June last year, but the real estate business development was earlier than the establishment of the department. An employee of Kuaishou Real Estate Business revealed to Tech Planet that the Kuaishou Ideal Home brand existed as early as 2020, when it was operating as a real estate pendant channel, when many anchors obtained a large number of real estate clues, business opportunities, or house buyers in the Kuaishou ecosystem, forming a lot of transactions, so Kuaishou specialized real estate business center came into being.

Kuaishou Real Estate Business Center is divided under the commercialization department, and the current person in charge is Liu Xiao, reporting to Wang Jianwei, vice president of Kuaishou. The distribution of housing cities is mainly second-tier cities, with a small number of new first-tier and third-tier cities.

Unlike the Byte Happiness model, which communicates directly with developers, Kuaishou does business models in the Kuaishou ecosystem. Kuaishou employees said that there are four scenarios in Kuaishou Real Estate: developers, anchors, users, and Kuaishou platform. The anchor uses the ideal home tool to sell the house live in Kuaishou, and users see the anchor by watching the live broadcast, leaving clues to the anchor. After the two parties contact, if the user has the intention to buy a house, the anchor can take the house to view the house after reporting to the Kuaishou platform, and after the transaction is completed, the developer's commission will be distributed to the Kuaishou platform and the anchor.

In essence, the business model of Byte's new housing business and Kuaishou real estate business is a commission model. In terms of commission, Kuaishou employees revealed that the level of commission is related to the city and BD ability, and generally non-first-tier cities, such as Shenyang and Tianjin, are about 2%-3% of the turnover.

In contrast, Kuaishou real estate commission ratio is not high, real estate industry insiders told Tech Planet that shells, Anjuke, commission commission 2%-10%, Tmall good house commission ratio is about 5%. If calculated in 2%-3% points, then Kuaishou 10 billion GTV commission share or around 2-300 million.

In terms of conversion, Kuaishou officially released data that the conversion from clues obtained through Kuaishou Ideal Home to subscription is 8 times that of traditional channels. However, some insiders questioned this, saying that the statistical caliber is different, the business scale will dilute the conversion rate, and the conversion rate of trillion GTV scale is not at the same level as the scale of tens of billions of GTV. The average conversion rate is as meaningless as the average income, "if the conversion of real estate transactions on the short video platform is so high, happiness should have been successful a long time ago", the latter backed by Douyin, a traffic perpetual motion machine, still failed to win the real estate business.

What is the money of the real estate business?

Internet companies that challenge the real estate business can almost form a "frustrated alliance".

In 2020, Alibaba and E-House announced the establishment of Tmall Haofang, and at the press conference, Ali sent Jiang Fan, then president of Tmall, to stand on the platform, and the chairman or president of more than 60 real estate companies attended to support, including the chairman of Vanke Group and the president of Country Garden.

E-House has set goals for Tmall Haofang in the next three years: to achieve 3 million daily active users on the platform, an annual transaction size (GTV) of more than 2 trillion yuan, and an annual revenue of 50 billion yuan, which means a three-year compound growth rate of about 84%.

However, Ali later sold its 85% stake in Tmall Haofang to E-House, which wholly owned the equity of Tmall Haofang. After the change of shareholding, although Tmall Haofang still implements a dual executive president system, the two presidents are Chen Liang (Hua Ming Tianyan) from Ali and He Yinyu, CEO of Leju Holdings. But Tmall Good House can no longer carry Ali's real estate dream.

A city manager of Tmall Good House told Tech Planet that the Tmall Good House business had almost completed full coverage, and there was more than one large city. But the company has been shrinking last year, shutting down business centers in cities such as Shandong. In his city company, the GTV target for the new house business is 10 million yuan a year, but only about one-third of it has been completed. The team currently has only one or twenty people, compared with about fifty or sixty people in the previous glory, "70-80% of the industry is lying flat, and half of the industry changed careers last year." ”

Byte Xingxingli's business is also depleted in their city, Tmall Haofang city manager said that Xingxingli also opened a branch in their city before, mainly doing advertising business, information flow advertising, but later also closed.

Former employees of Xingxingli revealed to Tech Planet that Xingxingli entered at the most glorious time in the real estate industry, backed by the Douyin traffic depression, but did not hug Douyin's lap. Xingxingli is just one of the many products of Byte, and it is necessary to fight for traffic distribution rights equally on Douyin, and it also has to pay corresponding costs. Douyin did not tilt more traffic to Xingxingli, but relying on Xingxingli's own traffic alone, the traffic was less, and many customers complained that there were many customers.

Jingdong Real Estate also failed to pry open the wealth code of the real estate track, Jingdong Real Estate entered the market in 2017, and Xin Lijun, then vice president of JD.com, announced that it would support the double champion of traffic and online transaction volume within five years. In 2020, JD Real Estate signed a strategic agreement with China SCE Group to officially launch the "self-operated real estate" business. But so far, JD.com's self-operated real estate has not made any big splashes in the industry.

Not only the new Internet companies, but also the real estate platform giant Shell have also struggled with losses in the past two years. Financial report data shows that the net loss of shells in 2019 and 2021 was 2.180 billion yuan and 525 million yuan, respectively. In 2020, it achieved a full-year profit, but in 2021, it had a net loss of 525 million yuan. In the third quarter of 2022, Shell turned a profit, but behind the profit was at the cost of shrinking business size: as of September 30, the number of active stores was 39,700, down 19.7% year-on-year, and the number of active brokers was 372718, down 20.4% year-on-year.

Although the real estate industry is recovering at present, the best dividend period has passed, and the latecomers cannot shake the status of industry giants in a short period of time. Kuaishou insiders said that Kuaishou Real Estate is unlikely to extend its offline business like Byte Happiness, nor is it likely to develop independent apps.

In general, the ceiling of Byte Happiness and Kuaishou real estate business may not be too high.