Vanke and Wanwu Cloud.

Within the 42 days from November until now, Vanke A has issued 15 announcements, 8 of which are related to guaranteed loans.

This is a microcosm - since this year, Vanke has been actively stabilizing its cash flow through various means to avoid a liquidity crunch.

For this reason, Vanke has put many assets on the shelf, and these assets were once the achievements Vanke obtained when exploring the boundaries of the real estate industry. Some have grown into leading brands in their respective fields.

Some people have said that a company that can redefine an industry and continuously explore its boundaries is great.

Vanke has done this before and has been talked about with relish. But one day, the content of these innovations and explorations came to an abrupt halt along with the cyclical transformation of the real estate industry like a landslide and a flood.

Now, people are more curious about whether Vanke can survive, what is left of Vanke now? And in the Vanke system after losing its aura, which business still retains a relatively complete Vanke spirit?

The former question is the one that homeowners and investors are most concerned about, and today we would like to talk more about the latter question.

  01  

Vanke once had a huge system, explored a great number of diversified businesses, and tried to enter different fields to "create another Vanke". Today, among them, the one that is the healthiest and the least likely to be put on the shelf is probably only Wanwuyun.

In the first half of this year, in an environment where the competition in the property management field has intensified, Wanwuyun still presented an outstanding financial report, with an income of 17.6 billion yuan, an increase of 9.6% year-on-year, and a net profit of 800 million yuan.

On October 23, through dividends, Wanwuyun sent about 680 million yuan of ammunition to Vanke - continuously feeding back to the Vanke Group in terms of funds.

And several recent actions of Wanwuyun also allow us to see that it is still doing several things like the former Vanke: doing a solid job in its main business, disassembling the service process for standardized reengineering. At the same time, it is also exploring new boundaries in three aspects: product price range, business scope, and service model.

In terms of price, Wanwuyun is testing to sink from the residential property service price range of more than 2.5 yuan/square meter/month to around 2 yuan/square meter/month. And this price is a very sensitive area in first- and second-tier cities, meaning that a large number of existing residential areas can be covered. The number of residential areas that Wanwuyun can reach will directly double, which will have an impact on some non-brand property management companies.

In the aspect of the service field, Wanwuyun acquired Dantian Property in 2024 and entered the property service track of campuses and hospitals on a large scale; cooperated with Highhope Capital to increase the community business track; plus invested in Cushman & Wakefield in 2020 to expand the commercial and enterprise service, as well as the urban service, industrial park service, home decoration, etc. that Wanwuyun explored previously. Suddenly, it will give people an illusion:

The business fields that Vanke wanted to enter in the past, today, Wanwuyun is penetrating into them all in its own way.

But the property service is a labor-intensive industry. In the words of Zhu Baoquan, the head of Wanwuyun: "There is no overall scale efficiency in this industry". To improve efficiency, two directions of homework must be done. One is to increase the local density and improve the reuse efficiency of people. The second is to take the technical route to improve management efficiency and AI substitution.

The above three directions are redefining Wanwuyun.

At present, the total market value of Vanke A is about 102.6 billion yuan, and the market value of Wanwuyun is about 22.8 billion yuan. However, the market value of Wanwuyun once exceeded 53 billion Hong Kong dollars, and some of its new businesses are not included in it.

Zhu Baoquan said that in the downward stage of the real estate market, property management companies are changing tracks. Wanwuyun will focus on three directions: Assets, Low Carbon, and AI.

"From property management to asset management, from property management to energy management transformation, from people management to event management for capacity transformation."

The future direction of Wanwuyun

Looking back, ten years ago, "On December 17, 2014, (Vanke Group at the strategic level) approved that Vanke Property could enter the market, and Vanke Property was released to the market, like a wild horse."

And ten years ago, it was when Vanke shouted that the real estate industry had entered the second half.

  02 

Wanwuyun has launched a plan: to explore the 2-yuan price range and enter the low-price market.

For the existing pattern of the property service industry, this is a blockbuster news.

In terms of specific strategies, Vanke Property has launched a new product "Zhixuan", using differentiated services to establish an "elastic pricing" method to enter the low-price market.

The "Zhixuan" product of Vanke Property takes the "full life cycle of project property services" as the main axis, comprehensively sorts out 95 service spaces and 1,530 operation objects in the community, totaling 508 operation SLAs (service items), forming a comprehensive set of service items. Then, 158 mandatory services and 350 optional services are classified and screened out. Free pricing is formed by choosing different combinations.

It is reported that the mandatory services are related to the value proposition of Vanke Property, and the optional services are not only the items that can be selected, but also the frequency can be selected.

Zou Ming, the partner in charge of the Vanke Property market, said that in the past, the price of property services was often through the pricing model of "packaging the number of people", and the homeowners could not really participate in the pricing process. At the same time, the industry background of the property fee reduction turmoil in Chongqing and the one-size-fits-all property fee limit in Qingdao has become the premise for Vanke to enter the stock market and launch low-price products.

36Kr has learned that Vanke Property is conducting experiments in a few communities in Beijing and other places to enter the low-price market. This does not mean that Vanke Property wants to embrace price competition, but is based on the premise of running through the model and calculating the accounts.

In addition to overthrowing the standardized pricing, another reason why Vanke Property really has the confidence to enter the low-price market is that Wanwuyun has upgraded its intelligent products and launched the "Lingshi" space operating system to save people and improve efficiency by using the "people + machine + remote" method.

According to the calculation of Vanke Property, if the price range of the service objects explores to about the 2-yuan level, the company will gain a new business growth space, and it will increase by about 110% significantly.

  03 

The newly launched "Lingshi", together with Vanke's existing "Heimao" and "Fenli", constitute the intelligent trio of Wanwuyun.

Among them, "Heimao" is mainly an intelligent passage system, "Fenli" is a self-service customer service system, and "Lingshi" is a new product based on the AI logic, including hardware and an operating system.

Zhu Baoquan analogizes "Lingshi" with Airbnb. The latter does not own hotels, but it has deeply changed the hotel industry. Obviously, Wanwuyun also wants to change the underlying logic of property service enterprises in management.

From the first launch of the facility management system in 2015 to today's "Lingshi", Wanwuyun has spent nearly 10 years to iterate. From the early single data integration to adding "links" to various devices in the space, to "Lingshi" using AI technology to analyze data and make decisions, and reporting events to property staff, allocating human resources and mechanical equipment through the system, "Since 2012, we have been investing 1-2 percentage points of the annual operating income in technology. From the initial investment of tens of millions of yuan to the current annual investment of several hundred million yuan, we hope that 'Lingshi' can become a technological product that will bring a qualitative change to the Chinese property industry in the next ten years."

"Lingshi is a space operating system and also the core of the project's intelligent decision-making." It has a basic edge computing server that supports CPU, GPU, and memory expansion, and can handle video streams, audio streams, information streams, computing power streams, geographic information streams, and energy streams. It also uses AI algorithms to assist in decision-making.

The author of 36Kr saw at the scene that through "Lingshi", not only can the real-time operating conditions of buildings and spaces be detected, air conditioners and lights can be turned on and off remotely, but also event warnings can be made for garbage not being placed in the designated position and strangers entering, and work orders can be issued at the same time. At the same time, "Lingshi" can also detect and statistics the energy utilization and asset operation status of the building to provide decision-making assistance.

It is understood that the "Lingshi" product and capabilities are universal in the real estate space and have been deployed in various spatial business forms such as Vanke Xingfuyu, Chuangzhiyun Center, Guangming Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, and Guangming Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University.

The new product is an addition by Wanwuyun to the "Butterfly City" strategy at the technical level, which is using technology to do things better than humans. And after achieving the extreme of "managing people" to "managing things", "All the positions that are sitting still are replaced by AI." (Zhu Baoquan's words)

From Vanke to Wanwuyun, there has always been vigilance about the "dependence on people", and "Lingshi" is not only a product but also a solution to the management radius problem that the company encounters after reaching a certain scale. "Lingshi" does technical improvement, and entering the low-price market to increase the density of regional layout. Both of these are adding on the logic of "property is a local area network".

Wanwuyun currently has 658 Butterfly Cities, and the three-year goal is to reach 1,000, with an increase of 52%. This is the strongest foundation for Wanwuyun's future performance growth.

  04 

While adding to the "Butterfly City", Wanwuyun is also continuing to expand new businesses, among which mergers and acquisitions are a very important way.

This year, Wanwuyun acquired Dantian Property to enter the property service track of campuses and hospitals.

Yu Jinlong, the general manager of Dantian Property, introduced that the annual contract amount of property services in domestic colleges and universities and hospitals exceeds 120 billion yuan, with great scale and potential. But compared with the residential property that Vanke Property has focused on for more than 30 years and the commercial and office property that Vanke Leasing has long cultivated, it is very different. For example, in terms of funding sources, the property fees for residential and commercial properties are self-raised by homeowners and enterprises, while the funds for colleges and universities and hospitals are all from fiscal expenditures, which are more easily concerned by the public. There is a strict third-party evaluation for their use; in terms of spatial characteristics, the management space of colleges and universities and hospitals is larger, and there are more people. And it must be on duty 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to ensure the intact operation of facilities and equipment.

At present, Dantian Property serves more than 260 projects nationwide, including 138 college and 46 Grade-A tertiary hospital projects.

It is revealed that 95% of the domestic college and hospital property service is the stock business, which is very difficult for new entrants. Between Wanwuyun and Dantian Property, one side has many years of service experience in the college and hospital track, and the other side has more internal and external resources and the "Lingshi" system.

Yu Jinlong said, "We will gradually invest the 'Lingshi' system in colleges and hospitals at the beginning of next year. With the support of Lingshi and the precipitation of Wanwuyun in space operation, we believe that we can redefine space efficiency. Let every penny supported by the finance get more returns."

For the current stage where mergers and acquisitions are still continuously carried out, Zhu Baoquan explained, "Mergers and acquisitions were very crazy five years ago... Let me talk about my opinions on mergers and acquisitions. From the global development process of all light-asset companies, mergers and acquisitions are the only way... For the future growth of all companies, mergers and acquisitions are the first. Second, looking at China's property management enterprises today, in a sense, in the crazy round of mergers and acquisitions five years ago, the financial statements of the acquired targets themselves were not clean. Because the company just entered the market, it was originally a subordinate enterprise of a real estate company. Even if it hurriedly entered the market, I think the logic of its financial statements is not enough. After these five years of changes, whether it is the enterprise that is ready to acquire or the enterprise that is acquired, everyone has a deeper understanding of the financial statements of a property management company. So today, what to look at and what not to look at, what to look at more carefully, where there are pits, and where there are tricks, everyone is very clear. Which data is true and which data is false, everyone is very clear. After this round of baptism, this industry has really entered the market."

Zhu Baoquan also revealed that in the field of property services in industrial parks and other spaces, the demand for cost reduction has become urgent, and the originally relatively stable connection between Party A and Party B is being broken. Therefore, new opportunities for entry and rapid expansion have emerged.

This also means that Wanwuyun still maintains an expansion pace, and maintaining the growth rate is the most important factor for real estate industry chain enterprises to establish internal and external "confidence".