Make yourself better and make everyone better.
Text丨Chinese businessman Taoluo Chen Lego
For a long time, the transaction of second-hand housing was a big project.
From the moment consumers want to buy and sell their homes, the trouble begins. House viewing, contract signing, online signing, housing payment delivery, fund depository, loan interview, tax payment and transfer...... The procedures are indispensable, the process cannot be left behind, multiple service locations, multiple visits, plus coordination with the bank, waiting for processing, the whole cycle is long and complicated.
This old problem in the real estate industry has begun to be solved with a service called "Sign-as-you-go".
In Qingdao, the average time spent on second-hand housing transactions in the past was 53.67 days from signing a contract to transferring ownership. The change brought about by "free signing" is that the average transaction time of Qingdao users has dropped to 32.3 days. At the same time, in multiple cities, the parties to the transaction can complete the housing appraisal, online signing procedures and loan interview at the designated contract service center, instead of going to multiple places.
The driving force behind this service is Beike, a leading one-stop new residential service platform in China.
With the launch of the "Sign Anywhere" service in Beijing, Tianjin, Qingdao, Shenzhen, Suzhou, Dalian and other cities, more and more users have been benefited by this – less travel and less time spent.
[From the "National Chain Family"]
In May 2022, the "Free Sign 'Online Loan Signature'" service was officially launched in Beijing Lianjia, where consumers only need to log in to the online system and complete the entire process of loan interview in as little as 15 minutes without leaving home. Up to now, the signing rate of Beijing Lianjia commercial loans has exceeded 98%, and the online loan signing rate has reached 77.45%.
Improving efficiency and experience is improving the quality of the service industry. In the history of Beike, services like "Sign-as-you-go" are just the tip of the iceberg of many innovations.
Since the era of Lianjia, "focusing on improving the industry first, and then continuing to improve itself" has become the core methodology of this company.
At the beginning of the century, when the real estate market was just starting, the leapfrog development of the industry brought about a continuous increase in transaction volume. The left-hand-in, right-hand out spread model has helped many intermediaries earn huge profits.
Under the pattern of rapid development, there are two major types of industry chaos undercurrent - low service quality and efficiency, and false and distorted housing information.
Among them, there are not only the malicious impact of intermediaries on business ethics, such as the fact that service providers are very easy to make a quick amount of money by "eating the price difference", which has a bad impact on consumers, and there are also buyers whose demand is rising rapidly, resulting in practitioners having neither time nor willingness to improve service levels.
In order to put an end to the behavior of "eating the price difference at both ends" and "being a second landlord", Lianjia used the model of "three-party contracting" internally to completely prevent brokers from eating the price difference shortly after its establishment. This approach initially led to the loss of a group of senior brokers, but it kept the bottom line of credit and brand from the root.
During the trough of the industry in 2008, Lianjia started a housing census campaign. It targets the prevalence of fake listings in the industry.
In the early days of the industry, real estate agents needed to enter as much information as possible into the service platform in order to increase coverage and attract demand. As a result, chaos has gradually arisen, and the entry of distorted information, and even false information, has become a well-known secret in the industry.
As a result, in more than 30 cities across the country, employees of Lianjia can be seen holding tape measures, cameras and notebooks, shuttling between various communities to take stock of the listings.
It is also matched by the supervision mechanism of "mobilizing the masses" - from the missing standards of the kitchen and bathroom, to the error of the layout, orientation, and decoration standards, every time the false listing is successfully reported, the whistleblower can get a reward of 100 yuan, which even allows a group of people to come to "chain the wool".
In 2011, Lianjia changed the requirements of real housing into a set of "four true" standards. This 12-year-long "real house" campaign has subtly become the criterion of Lianjia and the "standard action" of business operations. More importantly, this has become the most important asset of Shell today - the "real estate dictionary".
Looking at the big picture, this means that Beike has improved the real estate service industry again - it took the lead in establishing industry standards, and single-handedly pushed the transaction to the track of real estate listings and realized the purification of the industry.
At the same time as creating a "real estate dictionary", Lianjia has started another self-improvement - the comprehensive Internetization of business.
In 2009, "Internet house search" has become the general trend, in order to seize this most important traffic entrance in the future. Under the promotion of the management, Lianjia began to use the C-end Lianjia Online and the Sale Efficiency system open to brokers to promote the further improvement of the real property database, and at the same time complete the real data display for the C-side.
Ensure the fairness and openness of the transaction with transparent quotations, eliminate black-box operations with tripartite signing, and recruit college students to improve the quality of the employment team...... Lianjia has become the preferred choice in the field of rental and sales, and the title of "National Lianjia" comes from this.
Whether it is to improve the industry or improve itself, the reason why these industry pioneers can appear in the history of Lianjia and Beike depends to a large extent on the belief of the management - the era of quality competition will come.
After making a detailed observation of the policy and the industry, Mr. Zuo Hui, the founder of Lianjia and Beike, finally formed his own conclusion: low-level competition will definitely end, and the service ability around quality and efficiency is the most core competitiveness of real estate service enterprises in the future.
This has become a consistent concept from Lianjia to Beike - "good for users" and "good for the industry". Driven by such a concept, more innovations that are committed to sharing value with themselves, the industry, and consumers have begun to be born in Lianjia.
In 2011, the momentum of mobile Internet gradually rose, and the online real estate transactions of Lianjia were promoted, and in 2014, Peng Yongdong served as the CEO of Lianjia.com, and every year since then, Lianjia will invest 100 million yuan in the update of the "real estate dictionary" and the online business.
Real estate dictionary, online platform, offline store, broker team...... In order to create greater value for these "infrastructures" that have been built over the years, so that brokers across the industry can co-create value on the same platform, Beike has launched another "heavy-duty construction" aimed at reconstructing the process: ACN.
It is a network of partners that re-engineer the trading process and reposition the role of the broker in trading through competencies, functions and commission distribution mechanisms.
How it works can be simply summarized as: division of labor, cooperation, and sharing of commissions. Its essence is that under the premise of complying with the rules of housing information sharing and other rules formulated by Beike, agents of the same brand or cross-brand can participate in the same transaction with different roles, and the commission will be shared according to the commission ratio of each role after the transaction.
The new process divided by "each specialty" is a process of creating multiple values - brokers can participate in multiple links of multiple transactions in their own areas of expertise, which can not only promote the fine division of labor, improve the efficiency of resource utilization, but also reduce vicious competition and promote healthy competition, so as to improve service quality and customer satisfaction, and improve the scale and efficiency of the platform.
In order to ensure the safety of customers' real estate transactions, Beijing Lianjia launched the "Four Peace of Mind Service Commitments" in 2013, and after ten years of iterative upgrading, it has now formed the "Nine Peace of Mind Service Commitments". As of the end of November 2023, Beijing Lianjia's "Nine Peace of Mind Service Commitments" has accumulated a total of 1.253 billion yuan.
These self-improvement and industry improvement have brought many achievements to Beike.
For example, the business fundamentals that resist the cycle - although the real estate market has been deeply adjusted, Beike has handed over the latest three quarterly reports with steady growth.
For example, Beike's standardized construction - the industry's leading online housing database "Real Estate Dictionary", an ACN network that accommodates millions of brokers, as well as more than 500 broker credit score rules and 1,524 user consultation and question and answer models......
For example, reaching out to the grassroots – reaching as many communities as possible with 40,903 stores and nearly 400,000 active brokers has led to deeper and closer contacts. In a large number of community public welfare activities, these agents are the people around the residents, and they are close friends who teach the elderly to look at their mobile phones, teach the elderly to prevent falls, and provide parents with cool rest and ask for directions and drinking water.
From Lianjia to Shell, there are many changes and improvements, but the core connotation remains the same - make yourself better and make everyone better. It is also in this change and unchanged that the higher gold content is condensed into the brand of Shell.
[Invest first, one step ahead]
Whether it is the simple idea of "good for users" and "good for the industry", or the firm concept of "attaching importance to value creation", and the long-term belief of "adhering to long-termism and doing difficult but right things", they were all born from the long-term practice of Beike, a local company.
However, these ideas, concepts and beliefs can be highly coherent on another level, which is ESG.
The concept of ESG, which originated in developed economies, is attracting attention around the world, and more and more Chinese companies are actively recognizing it and then putting it into practice.
It is worth noting that in the past few years, many people have deviated from the understanding and implementation of ESG.
ESG covers three aspects: environment (E), social responsibility (S), and corporate governance (G), because it can be standardized from the dimensions of carbon emissions, clean energy use, product quality, corporate donations, and public welfare project investment, so that environmental protection and social responsibility are more valued. Some people even believe that ESG is a pure public welfare behavior of "one-way output".
This value proposition has led many people to directly equate the definition of ESG with environmental protection or public welfare, but can this popular belief represent the real ESG?
In fact, under the popular ESG concept, some of the most basic logic is often forgotten. For example, one of the factors that has the greatest impact on a company is the quality of its business.
If a company fails to achieve good corporate governance, lacks value creation, and is not commercially sustainable, then its environmental protection and public welfare will be difficult to sustain.
Therefore, compared with pure public welfare and environmental protection behaviors that are limited to "one-way output", the primary task of true ESG should be: to create more and more value for customers, for themselves, for the industry and society under good corporate governance, and to empower the industry and social progress.
Through Beike's practice, we can see how it creates value for customers, itself and the industry. As a pure service enterprise that is neither an environmental protection industry nor produces green energy, it has chosen a way that many people can't imagine: while standardizing itself, it has also promoted the progress of the industry and society, and at the same time has improved itself, it has also reaped positive feedback from the market.
To achieve this, three elements are indispensable: patience for continuous self-improvement, vision for the industry to be improved, and more importantly, the determination to invest in the first place, and the courage to be one step ahead.
From taking pictures and recording listings with tape measures and cameras, to applying VR, aerial photography, 3D models and other technologies to the listings on the entire platform to improve the authenticity of the listings and the online use experience, this is the patience of continuous self-improvement;
Despite having more than 40,000 active stores, it still invests every year to build an online platform to ensure that consumers can start the first step of the transaction in the most convenient way, which is also self-improvement and patience;
It is also a vision to focus on the areas to be improved in the industry.
The construction of a contract service center and the launch of the "free sign" service, so that more consumers can enjoy the high efficiency and excellent experience of real estate transactions, which is the vision of focusing on the areas to be improved in the industry;
Turning the scattered listings in the market into guaranteed and reliable long-term rental properties, and providing professional butler services, so that landlords and tenants can save worry and effort because of the "worry-free rent" service, this is still the vision that focuses on the areas to be improved in the industry;
After entering the era of stock housing, the improved housing consumption of "selling the old for the new" has become the main force, and the one-stop service of "renewing and purchasing" is used to accelerate the release of old housing, accelerate the accurate locking of new housing, and make the entire "old for new" cycle shorter, which is still focused on the vision of industry improvement.
Through the "New Youth Program", fresh graduates are provided with exclusive discounts of "real profits", "easy access" and "guaranteed", so that new young people who integrate into the city can rent well and rent steadily, and in the context of Shell's profit of 22.85 million yuan, as of the end of December 2022, 13,000 graduates have solved the problem of renting. This is also the vision of the industry to improve.
In the residential demand, decoration is the most complex part, because of the existence of bad Xi in the industry, "elated beginning, depressed end" has become the most distinctive change of mentality in decoration.
This has also become the starting point for Beike to improve the industry and create value. As a direct home improvement brand of Shell, Shengdu Decoration, founded in 2002, has launched a quality service guarantee initiative called "Ten Fears and Ten Promises".
Dismantling the "Ten Fears", what I see are consumers' worries about decoration, afraid of poor project quality, fear of excessive formaldehyde, fear of no way to complain, fear of spending money in vain...... When you open the "Ten Promises", what you see is the protection of Shell for consumers - promising 20 items of substandard quality to be "smashed without forgiveness", promising to smash and redo it free of charge after formaldehyde exceeds the standard, promising that customers are not satisfied with the design service fee will be refunded half, and the group will be directly supplied by the centralized procurement manufacturer, and the official price difference will be returned......
Whether it is a real estate dictionary, ACN, VR viewing, or worry-free rent, free signing, new purchase, new youth plan, as well as "nine peace of mind service commitments", "ten fears and ten promises" and other targeted measures based on the pain points of the industry, they all have one thing in common - they are all one step or even a few steps ahead of the industry, and they all require innovators to pay first and come up with real money to invest.
It is with the patience of continuous self-improvement, the vision to focus on the areas to be improved in the industry, and the determination and courage to be one step ahead, Beike has finally been able to launch a series of innovations and creations.
Through these innovations and creations, Beike leaves certainty to users, pressure to itself, quality to users, complexity to itself, improvement to the industry, and diligence to itself. It is in this cycle that Beike has achieved its status as an "industry promoter" and reaped positive feedback from market reputation to performance.
【From Happiness to Peace】
Maximizing the value of benefiting itself, the industry, and consumers is the biggest feature of Beike's ESG practice.
And to do this, there is another indispensable factor: people.
No matter how good a strategy is, it needs specific people to execute. "After the route is determined, the cadre is the decisive factor", which describes the role of people, "strategic planning, talent first", which is also emphasizing the concept of talent management. In the residential service industry, in which "people serve people", in order to ensure the experience of consumers, it is first necessary to realize the self-improvement of service providers.
For Beike, this is not only another embodiment of "investment first", but also a practice of promoting the quality of the industry in the ESG concept.
Since 2016, hundreds of thousands of Shell's brokers have added a new pressure - exams.
The exam, called the "Fight Exam", is aimed at all agents of Beike, and the content of the exam includes basic real estate knowledge, brokerage services, transaction services, and transaction regulations, covering almost all the problems that may be encountered in the service link. The propositioners include senior proposition experts in the big exam, experts in various specialties of Beijing Lianjia, experts in policies and regulations, and even backbone brokers in the front line of business.
This is obviously a highly purposeful examination, and Beike hopes to further complete the training of the practitioner team in the form of a qualification examination, so as to achieve the unity and leap of service quality. So much so that a popular phrase was born inside the shell: "My thousands of questions, for you zero problems".
In December 2023, with the successful conclusion of the 24th Beike Fighting Examination, 311,000 brokers from 90 cities once again experienced a centralized improvement.
This kind of exam seems to be only internal, but its significance does not stop at the Beike system - all brokers who have worked in Beike are highly trained to move to any institution in the industry.
This kind of unification of service standards is called "ordinary majority" in the context of Beike, combined with its breadth coverage, so that Beike's managers have the confidence to say that "there is no difference between good and bad brokers in our brokers" and "every matching broker is the most suitable" when facing the outside world. ”
Compared with investing in things, investing in people may release the effects in a longer period of time and longer. Therefore, within Beike, there are not only the Shell Brokerage School for brokers, but also the "Huaqiao School" and "Hongyu School" for professional store owners, and the "Seiko School" for professional technicians.
Compared with many professional trainings in society, Beike's training obviously occupies the "geographical convenience", it has rich practical experience and specific business scenarios, which allows students to not only learn Xi theory in the training, but also combine real practical operations.
In the Seiko School, 38 construction processes, 154 process acceptance standards, as well as engineering knowledge such as the four major quality inspection systems and nine nodes in the construction process are introduced into the teaching instruction manual, and the real residential decoration site is replicated in the classroom to provide students with practical opportunities and certification assessments, so as to avoid the embarrassment of "disconnection from business" and "not grounded".
By the end of 2022, 894 project managers and 4,683 workers had become qualified practitioners after being trained and certified at Seiko Academy.
Cultivating talents with a system, sending talents to the industry, creating more value from these talents, and then sharing the value with users, themselves and the industry, constitutes a sustainable business talent model. And this kind of sustainability, obviously, also belongs to the sustainable development of business.
In today's era of ESG development, ESG research on the service industry is actually a new topic in the field of ESG.
Compared with industries such as photovoltaic and new energy, Beike's ESG performance may not be able to reach conventional conclusions. However, its thinking is a more real and practical practice of the ESG concept - let the development of enterprises create value, so that all stakeholders can obtain tangible benefits.
After all, it's never wrong to make yourself better and make everyone better, and it's never going out of style.
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