Get rid of real estate agents! A former Alibaba engineer has reconstructed the home rental business with AI, lifting labor efficiency by 10 times and having nearly 2 million registered users.
Origin of Entrepreneurship: Personal Experience of Danke's Collapse
In 2020, Xu Wenchun, who was then working in the R&D team of Alibaba's e-commerce advertising department, witnessed the collapse of Danke Apartment firsthand. Seeing young people around him being evicted even after paying their rent, and comparing the situation with the e-commerce, travel and food delivery industries that had long been reconstructed by internet technology, a seed of change was planted in his heart: "Technology is already so advanced, why is it still so difficult for young people to find a reliable rental property?"
The number of people renting houses in China has reached 260 million, the overall rental market size has exceeded 3 trillion yuan, and the intermediary service market is estimated to be nearly 200 billion yuan. According to the data from *2026 China Housing Rental Brand Development Report*, the number of rental population in the four first-tier cities is close to 40 million, accounting for more than 50% of the total local population, the institutionalization rate of the rental market is 10%, and the rental proportion of the post-2000s generation in first-tier cities has reached 68%. However, there have always been pain points in the current industry pattern: platforms that focus on real housing sources charge high commissions and have low housing type matching degree, while traffic platforms are flooded with false information and unlicensed intermediaries. Young people cannot find rental channels that combine real cost performance and guaranteed services. As the post-2000s generation gradually becomes the main group of renters, this contradiction between supply and demand has become increasingly prominent.
Product Exploration and Iteration from 0 to 1
In 2022, Xu Wenchun, founder of Weiguo Rental, launched the project in his spare time with his roommate who worked in the Feishu department of ByteDance. Later, senior industry practitioners including the former deputy general manager of Ziroom and serial entrepreneurs joined the team, forming a core team integrating technology and industrial operation. There was no mature comparable model on the way of exploring from scratch. The team was initially stuck in the balance between commercial realization of the model and service quality. After nearly four years of iteration and polishing, the business model has finally been validated. At present, the number of users is close to 2 million, with 150,000 listed housing units and more than 1,000 cooperative merchants. The 0-1 verification has been completed, and the project has entered the 1-10 expansion stage, achieving positive cash flow. It has also reached cooperation with leading long-term rental brands such as China Resources Youchao, Longfor Yuyu and Ziroom.
Different from traditional rental platforms that focus on serving real estate agents, Weiguo Rental has been positioned to directly connect and serve landlords from the very beginning. It uses AI technology to undertake the core functions originally completed by agents, and cuts off intermediate links to reduce costs by finely splitting the whole process of traditional intermediary work. At the technical level, AI has been deeply implemented in all scenarios: on the customer acquisition end, AI improves the efficiency of self-media content production by more than 80%; the 7*24-hour online AI renter assistant "Xiao Guo" can complete the whole-process recommendation service from house hunting to check-in; offline, AI empowers house viewing consultants, so that new employees can start working after simple training. The overall labor efficiency is 5-10 times higher than that of the traditional rental model, and it is expected to realize large-scale unmanned house viewing in the future. This asset-light crowdsourced house viewing model has also created more flexible employment positions for the society.
At present, Weiguo's customer acquisition mainly relies on self-media platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, as well as university channels, to accurately cover urban young people with a budget of 2000-5000 yuan. Early users highly recognize the platform's advantage of real housing sources. A recent graduate renter in Beijing said that he got stood up three times when looking for houses on other platforms in a week, but he finalized a formal housing unit that meets his budget on Weiguo in only one day. The whole process is transparent with no hidden charges, and there is also a complete platform guarantee service, which avoids a lot of disputes that often occur when renting houses through traditional small and medium-sized intermediaries.
Future Development Direction
In terms of business model, Weiguo's current main revenue comes from transaction commission fees and value-added service fees for members. The UE model has been verified, and the business closed loop has been proven. According to the plan, the project will speed up the layout of offline service networks in the next step, and improve service quality and user reputation by empowering offline scenarios. In the next 3-5 years, it will gradually expand from a rental transaction platform to a rental life service platform targeting urban young people, and expand value-added services centered on housing such as second-hand idle goods trading, pet-related services and social networking.
After four years of in-depth cross-industry cultivation, the Weiguo team is more convinced that housing rental is a livelihood issue, and should not become a tool for platforms to pursue profits. The team's original intention has never been to replicate traditional intermediary platforms, but to solve the industry trust and service guarantee problems exposed after Danke's operational crisis, so that hundreds of millions of urban young people can live decently and at ease, and allow practitioners to provide high-quality and reliable services with more dignity. This team with top internet technology genes and real estate industry operation experience is redefining the pattern of the trillion-yuan rental market with AI, and filling the market gap of rental channels with real and cost-effective housing sources.