Ziroom enters the second-hand housing market, selling houses with "beautifully decorated" features.

In early March, Ziroom, the largest housing rental enterprise in China, announced the launch of its second-hand housing business, "Ziroom Beautiful Home," and entered the second-hand housing transaction market.

Subsequently, Xiong Lin, the chairman of the Ziroom Group, also reposted this news on his WeChat Moments.

On the same day, the Ziroom rental mini-program also launched this business and ranked it before Ziroom's existing core businesses, rental and home services, for key promotion.

Screenshot of the mini-program

Currently, there are still many pain points in the second-hand housing market. When selling a house, there are many listings but few customers, customers have many requirements, and the selling cycle is long; when buying a house, there is a high proportion of old houses, which is time-consuming and laborious, and the commission is high. Ziroom replied to 36Kr that it observed that when cooperative homeowners switch from renting to selling their houses or when platform tenants have a demand for house purchase, the housing sources renovated and beautified by Ziroom have high viewing efficiency and fast transaction speed during buying and selling. This is the starting point for Ziroom to enter the second-hand housing business.

Ziroom Beautiful Home's second-hand housing services include a complete intermediary service chain such as housing trusteeship, decoration and beautification, house viewing, and transaction signing. Different from the traditional intermediary model, Ziroom Beautiful Home will carry out different degrees of "decoration and beautification" on the housing sources to improve the appearance of the house and the convenience of the buyer's move-in.

This model is similar to the "housing source beautification and consignment sale" abroad. The consignment sale company negotiates a minimum selling price with the homeowner, then decorates and beautifies the housing source, and then promotes it to the market at a specific price. The core business of the consignment sale company comes from the premium generated by the decoration of the housing source.

However, 36Kr learned that the "decoration and beautification" of Ziroom Beautiful Home will be billed separately and does not fully refer to the existing "housing source beautification and consignment sale" model.

In terms of offline channels, the current news obtained by 36Kr is that in the initial stage, Ziroom Beautiful Home will not invest heavily offline to build physical stores. Instead, it will hold Open House events, that is, housing source open days, to invite real estate agents in the industry and interested customers to visit on-site. Ziroom housekeepers will give on-site explanations and analyses, and use the real estate agent network and the whole network resources to sell the housing sources.

01 

According to the information in Ziroom's internal letter, the core actions in the first stage of Ziroom Beautiful Home's second-hand housing business include three aspects:

1. Three major products: Carefully select high-quality housing sources in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Through three major products, namely, Refreshed Good Houses, Bare Good Houses, and Heartful Good Houses, help homeowners sell their houses. Combining Ziroom's home decoration capabilities, make the houses sold by homeowners better, more beautiful, and more intelligent.

2. Joint sale of housing sources across the whole network: Open the housing sources of Ziroom Beautiful Home to certified partners across the whole network. Relying on the digital and intelligent capabilities accumulated over the past 13 years, such as the urban dictionary, housing source files, VR house viewing, video introductions, and AI house hunting, make the house buying and selling experience easier.

3. 20% discount on buying and selling commissions: Launch a special commission policy for buying and selling. From March 1st to 31st, users who buy/sell second-hand houses through Ziroom can enjoy a 20% discount on commissions within the validity period of the rights and interests (before August 31, 2025).

In addition, Ziroom also launched targeted discounts for homeowners in its rental business: Homeowners who have signed contracts such as the worry-free rental contract and terminate the contract early and list their houses for sale on Ziroom Beautiful Home can enjoy a discount on the liquidated damages.

Ziroom mini-program page

At the same time, Ziroom Beautiful Home also launched the "Ten Service Commitments," including compensating 100 yuan for overdue feedback on house viewings, advancing payment for property arrears, and refunding the full commission if the transaction fails, fully benchmarking against Lianjia.

Ziroom mini-program page

02 

From the perspective of products and business models, there are obvious differences between Ziroom Beautiful Home and Lianjia.

Ziroom Beautiful Home's products include three types: Refreshed Good Houses, Bare Good Houses, and Heartful Good Houses. The main difference between them lies in the degree of decoration and beautification. Specifically:

Refreshed Good Houses: A 7-day beautification and refresh service for semi-furnished houses for sale. Focus on the quality improvement of fully furnished and semi-furnished housing sources, and customize optimization and renovation plans for each house. Through maintenance and reinforcement, replacement of old items, home furnishing refresh, and atmosphere refresh, upgrade the housing sources from a score of 6 to 10.

Bare Good Houses: A service for the bare renovation and sale of old houses. Focus on the in-depth renovation of old housing sources. Optimize the layout through AI + exclusive designers. Completely renovate the walls, floors, and ceilings with high-quality basic hard decoration of "18001," comprehensively reshape the water and electricity systems, restore the purest texture, and reserve enough space and more possibilities for customers' personalized customized full decoration.

Heartful Good Houses: A service for the artistic and intelligent full decoration and sale of old houses. High-quality housing sources renovated according to Ziroom Heartful's decoration standards, with two styles, Qingyu and Jianai. Heartful housing sources have the advantages of international minimalist aesthetics, personalized functional customization, Lingzhi smart home, deep breathing environmental protection, and intelligent and artistic craftsmanship.

Ziroom mini-program page

Currently, on Ziroom's official website, an entry for the second-hand housing transaction business has been added, but the second-hand housing business is not separately reflected in parts such as the house hunting menu bar and business sections.

Ziroom mini-program page

On the page of Ziroom Beautiful Home's second-hand housing, when clicking on the three major product sections of Refreshed Good Houses, Bare Good Houses, and Heartful Good Houses, the web page cannot be opened, and no housing sources are displayed.

Ziroom mini-program page

Ziroom said in its internal letter that "for the 'home,' we can already provide full-cycle and full-chain products and services such as buying and selling, renting, intelligent home decoration, and life services."

Currently, Ziroom Beautiful Home's second-hand housing business is mainly launched in Beijing and Shanghai and adopts the mainstream bilateral commission model in the market.

In the Beijing market, a 1% commission is charged from both the buyer and the seller, and in Shanghai, a 1% commission is charged from the seller and a 2% commission is charged from the buyer. During the promotion period before August 31, the commissions of both the buyer and the seller can be discounted by 20%.

03

From a business logic perspective, Ziroom's development of the second-hand housing transaction business is a vertical extension of the industrial chain. Ziroom has over one million housing sources in hand, and behind them are nearly one million homeowners, many of whom have the demand to "switch from renting to selling."

On the other hand, the core model of Ziroom's rental business is to simply decorate the collected housing sources and then rent them out. This has allowed Ziroom to accumulate strong home decoration supply chain capabilities. It renovates about 83,000 housing sources each year, with an average assembly cycle of about 33 days.

Both the housing sources and the beautification and consignment sale are within Ziroom's existing capabilities.

However, the rapid development of Ziroom Beautiful Home still depends on the sales speed of the listed housing sources.

It is true that Ziroom's home service business has over 1.5 million members, and its rental business has served about five million tenants in total. These existing customers can all become potential customers of Ziroom Beautiful Home and help Ziroom digest the listed second-hand housing sources.

However, if Ziroom Beautiful Home needs to advance the home decoration costs for the housing source beautification, the demand for this part of the funds will be a significant occupation of working capital as the number of housing sources increases.

In addition, if the listed housing sources fail to reach the target selling price and cannot cover the home decoration costs, or if the homeowner closes the deal with another intermediary company, how will the fees be settled? How long will the settlement cycle be? These will also affect the turnover speed of Ziroom Beautiful Home.

04

At the end of last year, Ziroom publicly released a set of comprehensive data from the whole network:

In the first three quarters of 2024, the number of listings in the Beijing housing rental market increased by 20% year-on-year, and that in Shanghai increased by 25% year-on-year;

In terms of the rental cycle, the average rental cycle of ordinary rental housing sources in Beijing increased by 16% year-on-year, and that in Shanghai increased by 32% year-on-year, both approaching 40 days;

In terms of rent, the average transaction rent level of ordinary rental housing sources in Beijing decreased by 4% year-on-year, and that in Shanghai decreased by 1% year-on-year. The average rent of residential properties in first- and second-tier representative cities showed a year-on-year decline.

The rental market is gradually becoming a "tough" area. Rental enterprises are constantly exploring new businesses and models to relieve the pressure, including O2O in the industry chain and REITs in the capital market.

In the two cities where Ziroom Beautiful Home first deployed, Beijing and Shanghai, the proportion of second-hand housing transactions reached a new high in 2024, 78% and 81% respectively, making them two of the cities with the highest proportions among the key cities in the country.

Considering the increase in second-hand housing transactions and the decline in the rental market, it is not difficult to understand the market logic of Ziroom's extension from its existing capabilities to the second-hand housing market.

Source: Zhenjiaolujun

In the long run, the structure of the rental market is undergoing great changes. During the 14th Five-Year Plan period, the target for raising affordable rental housing is 8.7 million units, and first-tier cities are the main battlefields for the development of affordable rental housing.

The listing of these housing sources will have a large-scale impact on the existing market rent and scattered rental housing sources. As a rental enterprise with a large number of individual homeowner housing sources, Ziroom will also face corresponding pressure.

Source: Zhenjiaolujun

Therefore, on the one hand, Ziroom is strengthening its centralized long-term rental apartments and ensuring the stability of housing sources and tenants through "incorporating into affordable housing programs"; on the other hand, it is extending to the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, launching new businesses, improving the reuse rate of real estate agents, channels, and traffic, and reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

05

Ziroom's entry into the second-hand housing market overlaps with Lianjia's business. Beijing and Shanghai, where Ziroom Beautiful Home first deployed, are also Lianjia's strongholds.

Lianjia entered the rental market several years ago. Currently, the number of rental housing sources of Lianjia in Shanghai is about 66,000 units, and that in Beijing is about 76,000 units.

In the past two years, Lianjia has been vigorously developing its rental business. On the one hand, it can compete for the housing sources for second-hand housing sales from the rental market and lock in the listed housing sources one step ahead in time; on the other hand, the rental business has also become a "human resources pool" for Lianjia to train a large number of new real estate agents, allowing new agents to gradually adapt to the workplace through the high-frequency and low-difficulty rental business.

In addition, as Lianjia reduces the commission ratio for buying and selling transactions, the rental business, as one of the diversified businesses, is also a necessary section for Lianjia to smooth the income fluctuations of real estate agents.

Reversing from Lianjia's logic, we can also understand the important significance of Ziroom Beautiful Home's new business for Ziroom.

Ziroom and Lianjia originally had the same origin, with both founders being Zuo Hui. However, after a series of adjustments before the listing of Beike, Ziroom and Lianjia have become two independent enterprises, and the overlap of