Online home-buying cushions housing sector against virus outbreak

Alongside fresh food sales, online learning and working, the real estate sector has become the latest to embrace e-commerce amid the novel coronavirus outbreak in China.

Feng Meiling, a 26-year-old salesperson at the Hainan branch of Evergrande, a leading Chinese real estate firm, now has a new identity — an anchor on TikTok, a popular video-sharing and livestreaming platform.

“I wasn’t quite myself at first, speaking to nobody but a phone rather than communicating with home buyers face to face,” said Feng, whose first livestreaming pitch for selling homes attracted only 77 viewers on TikTok.

To avert unnecessary gatherings and curb the transmission of the novel coronavirus, major real estate firms across the country closed their brick-and-mortar sales offices during the Spring Festival holiday, an otherwise peak season for purchasing homes in China.

In January, a total of 15.39 million square meters of residential space were traded in 40 major Chinese cities, down 5.9 percent year on year and slumping by 33.9 percent from the previous month, data from real estate researcher EH Consulting showed.

To cushion the blows, real estate agents have set up online sales offices and resorted to livestreaming to attract consumers.

Evergrande has developed an app called Hengfangtong, providing one-stop services from showcasing houses through virtual reality to signing contracts. It has listed all its properties on the app since February 13. “It was mainly used to recruit part-time salesmen, but since the outbreak, it has become an online trading platform for real estate sales,” said Liu Zexin, sales manager of the company’s Hainan branch.

Online shopping was hardly acknowledged in the real estate sector, as buying houses is, after all, something that warrants the practice of “seeing is believing.”

But this transition is picking up steam. The registered users of Hengfangtong increased by more than 3 million, who pre-ordered 68,019 units of flats within just six days, according to Liu Xuefei, vice president of Evergrande.

About 151 of the top 200 real estate firms have now adopted online marketing and 143 had their online sales office, according to CRIC, a real estate researcher.

According to data from Taobao Live, the livestreaming unit of e-commerce giant Alibaba, over 5,000 real estate counselors from nearly 100 cities have entered its livestreaming rooms, enabling buyers to view houses, consult and make deals all at home.