The shells have become heavier.
Nowadays, the mainstream enterprises in the real estate industry are expanding their light-asset businesses and taking the route of "shedding burdens", but there is one enterprise that is going in the opposite direction and becoming heavier, and that is: Ke.com.
01 Going Deep with "Heaviness"
The starting point of Ke.com is the second-hand house trading, which is essentially a very "light" matchmaking transaction. Around 2015, with the rise of the "Internet +", Ke.com, which was in the exploration period, once had the opportunity to take a more "asset-light" Internet platform model like iwjw.com, but in the end, it chose the industrial Internet logic of doing vertical deepening, increasing technological investment (such as VR) and service investment, constantly becoming "heavier", and instead turned into a more useful, efficient, and resilient platform.
Source: Ke.com
In recent years, the industry environment has changed, but Ke.com has not stopped on the road of becoming "heavier". Becoming "heavier" is mainly manifested in three aspects:
1. In July 2023, Ke.com plans to upgrade its corporate strategy to "One Body and Three Wings", expanding into four business lines: brokerage, home decoration, Huiju, and Beihaojia. Among them, the business models of home decoration and Beihaojia are heavier than the brokerage business.
The core of Ke.com's innovation is to "redo the industry once again", and by entering the home decoration and new house development services through Bewo and Beihaojia, and going deep into the industrial chain to make model changes, there must be a process of personally "running the business once" in the early stage. At this stage, the business model will definitely be made "heavier" to thoroughly understand the industry.
2. Ke.com's offline business is also becoming heavier. On the one hand, the stores mainly led by Lianjia are transforming from a single transaction place to a "community supporting" service facility, and the functions of the stores are more comprehensive; on the other hand, since 2019, Ke.com has been upgrading the previous transaction center into a one-stop service scenario that covers signing, loan approval, tax payment, mortgage registration, transfer registration, and self-service printing and collection of real estate certificates.
Up to now, Ke.com has deployed 322 signing centers in 51 cities across the country, and through heavy investment in the offline service scenario, it has completed the most important standardized professional service in the transaction process. These signing centers are not for profit, and the Ke.com signing service center in Suzhou has even become a convenience service point awarded by the government.
3. The service investment and liability ratio of the Ke.com platform are also becoming heavier. In November this year, Ke.com announced the launch of a platform-level service commitment and the establishment of a 100 million yuan platform compensation guarantee fund to ensure the fulfillment of the service commitments of the brokerage brands settled in Ke.com, which also marks the upgrade of the responsibility of the Ke.com platform from the previous "supervision" to active liability assumption.
With more investment, increased compensation, and active liability assumption, the new platform role positioning of Ke.com is different from most platform models. Especially in the real estate brokerage industry with a long transaction process, many risk points, and a large amount of funds, Ke.com's "becoming heavier" essentially indicates that its understanding of this industry has entered a new level.
This article mainly analyzes the third point today, why Ke.com wants to make the platform itself heavier through services.
02 Shared Compensation
In the previous stage, Ke.com drew on the development experience of Internet industry giants. The core model is toBtoC. The platform collects business brand and commodity (housing source) information. While connecting businesses (B) and consumers (C), it is also the setter and supervisor of service standards.
In simple terms, the platform builds a "field" to become a commodity pool and traffic pool, and is responsible for formulating transaction mechanisms. However, if there is a problem with the transaction, the main liability for compensation is the merchant, and the main role of the platform is to urge compensation and performance.
For most transactions, this model is not a problem, but in recent years, when Ke.com continuously analyzed transaction data and improved the average service level, it found that: Different brand stores have different funds and service capabilities, resulting in differences in service commitment terms given by different brands, and the ability to fulfill and compensate also varies greatly.
This phenomenon will cause confusion for a small number of home buyers: During the transaction process of a house, consumers will contact 3 - 4 brokers. These brokers may belong to different stores or even different brokerage brands. There may be a variance in service capabilities among these brokers and stores, and different service commitments will be conveyed to consumers.
For example, for the "Leak Disclosure and Loss Compensation" item that Ke.com is promoting and implementing in major cities across the country, although the vast majority of settled brands have committed to this service, some brands define the leak range to include balconies, terraces, windows, exterior walls, and top roof, with a wide coverage range, while some brands can only give compensation commitments for indoor water pipes and window leaks.
The variance in service levels among different brokerage brands and individuals leads to increased uncertainty in the transaction process, which is likely to cause confusion for consumers.
At the same time, stores with poor compensation and performance capabilities will shift more responsibilities to stores with strong performance guarantee capabilities, and "shearing the sheep" occurs, which instead makes brands that are good to consumers bear a greater burden.
There are also some service commitments that should have reached a consensus, but due to the large differences in the performance capabilities of brand stores, they have not actually been covered on the entire Ke.com platform. For example, "Return the agency fee if the transaction is not completed" is a key service commitment that Ke.com has been continuously promoting. In the past, 86% of the 438 brand stores that made the commitment, and 14% of the stores did not commit to this service.
There are about 42,000 stores and more than 400,000 brokers on the entire Ke.com platform. In the real estate transaction with a transaction cycle of several months and more than 20 key nodes in the transaction process, the difference in service levels will be further magnified. If the responsibilities and services are all left to merchants and outsourcing, the speed of industry evolution will be discounted.
Ge Jing, Chief Quality Officer of Ke.com
In order to make consumers' choices simpler and make the service quality of the entire platform more balanced, Ke.com has chosen to "guarantee" the key service commitments, increase the direct investment of the platform through shared compensation, improve the coverage and performance rate of service commitments, to ensure the operational safety and economic interests of service providers and the experience of consumers, and make house buying simpler and safer.
"If you want to assume more responsibilities, you must be heavy. Because in this process, you need to find the needs of customers and find breakthrough points, there will be investment and losses." Li Fengyan, the Chief Operating Officer of Ke.com Brokerage Business Line and the City Chief Operating Officer of Ke.com, said, "But from the perspective of industry development, Ke.com already has the ability to do more things. From the perspective of understanding, we believe that the more standardized the transaction, the more the industry will benefit."
03 C before B
In the platform model, Ke.com is toBtoC, and both service providers and consumers are indispensable. However, in the compensation process of fulfilling the service commitment, Ke.com has chosen "C before B", putting consumers in a more important position.
"To enable C to get a quick solution, and on the other hand, to share the compensation cost and pressure of the B-side (brand), this is a major change in our customer complaint handling process." Ge Jing, the Chief Quality Officer of Ke.com, explained, "If the customer Complains to the platform, the platform will compensate C according to the unified handling standard first, and then the platform will check with the service brand (B-side) of the transaction. According to whether the B-side has fulfilled the service standard required by the platform in this process, if the B-side has fulfilled its responsibility, it does not need to bear the compensation, and the platform will bear it. If the B-side has not fulfilled its responsibility, the platform will pursue the responsibility, or the platform and the B-side will share the compensation."
The core of "C before B" is to simplify the compensation process for consumers. In the transaction process, the platform directly changes from the previous "supervisory and law enforcement party" to the performance party, and the controllability of the compensation process and scheme is increased.
According to the internal statistics of Ke.com, after the "C before B" shared compensation mechanism was launched on the platform, the compensation identification and performance were uniformly handled by the platform's SST centralized customer complaint handling center, and the satisfaction rate of compensation orders increased by 10 percentage points to 90%.
Based on Ke.com's intervention in service commitment performance and service capability improvement with platform capabilities, Ke.com has also taken the opportunity to improve service standards and launch the Ke.com "3 + 3" platform-level service commitment:
In Ke.com cities across the country, promote the full implementation of the three major platform-level commitments: "Real Housing Sources, Compensate One Hundred Yuan for False Ones", "If the Transaction Fails, the Commission will be Unconditionally Returned", and "If the Property Fee is in Arrears, the Loss will be Advanced".
In some cities of Ke.com, launch three commitments: "All Standards are Met, and the House Payment is Guaranteed by the Platform", "Leak Disclosure and Loss Compensation", and "No Telephone Marketing, Compensate One Hundred Yuan for Disturbance". In the future, Ke.com will gradually promote these commitments to the whole country according to the implementation situation in each city.
Ke.com "3 + 3" Platform-Level Service Commitment
According to statistics, since 2018, Ke.com has provided a total of 37 various service commitments on the platform, covering 465 settled brands, providing guarantees to more than 6 million customers, and the amount of service commitment performance has reached 3.9 billion yuan. Among them, for the item "If the transaction fails, the commission will be returned" alone, the amount of commission that should be returned in the past year has reached 550 million yuan.
After Ke.com continues to make the platform service "heavier", these data will continue to rise.
The reason why Ke.com dares to share compensation and become "heavier" is a consensus within the team: The basis for the continuous evolution of Ke.com is, first, to be able to continuously see the pain points of consumers, and second, to keep the internal ecology of the organization pure and clean, with a service-oriented approach.
And the bottom-line thinking of shared compensation and "C before B" is another confirmation of Ke.com's "looking inward" and self-evolution.
04 Becoming the Entrance to Living
Since its establishment in 2018, Ke.com has become a representative enterprise in the domestic living field.
Where is Ke.com going? What will Ke.com become? It is a topic that all real estate people are concerned about.
And Ke.com's "becoming heavier" gives a good explanation: Ke.com is willing to position itself in the industry, rather than an individual enterprise, to find the future development direction.
Specifically in Ke.com's actions, in recent years, whether it is the construction of service standards and service tools, the construction of the compensation fund pool for service standards, or the promotion of a benign mechanism, Ke.com positions itself as a "pilot" and an ecological builder, rather than a "catfish".
And Ke.com's ultimate goal is to become the entrance to "living" for Chinese consumers. Outside the e-commerce and travel platforms in the Internet industry, it will open up the service chain related to living, re-integrate from the perspective of service providers, and integrate into a living service entrance.
Therefore, Ke.com's "becoming heavier" is actually changing the previous capital and sales perspective of the real estate industry, providing a possibility to redo the industry from the perspective of service providers, and making the living transaction simpler.