Beike paid a little cost and won the battle for "good living".
Once, a big shot in the industry sighed: Usually, when spending dozens of yuan on a meal or a dozen yuan on a takeaway, we can see detailed reviews on the platform about the restaurant, the taste of the food, and the service level, which can serve as a reference for whether to place an order. But it's already 2025, and when buying a house worth hundreds of thousands, millions, or even tens of millions of yuan, we still can't find a reliable and trustworthy evaluation system for assessment.
In 2025, the industry insiders called it the "Year of Good Houses". The concept of "good houses" was written into the government work report for the first time, and the upgrading of real estate products accelerated comprehensively. Consumers have entered a new stage from "buying a house" to "selecting a house".
In the new era, the survival environment of real estate development and service enterprises has changed, and enterprises have reached the second - startup process of "changing leads to survival" and "waiting leads to death".
During this period, for consumers, the attractiveness of "good quality" and cost - effectiveness is far greater than "immediate ownership", and trust has become even more important. For enterprises, scale is still effective in smoothing the performance curve and reducing capital costs, but the marginal revenue of scale benefits is declining, and the importance of good products, good services, and operational efficiency has increased.
Generally speaking, during the market transformation period, the costs of enterprises will rise. However, there are two distinct main factors for the increase in costs and the decline in profits: one is being dragged down by the old models and old inventories, which is the "historical cost" of enterprises; the other is the market cost paid to win consumers' trust, which is actually a "future investment".
If we want to find an analysis sample, Beike is a must - choose option. In the real estate industry, Beike has always been an "ahead - of - the - curve sample". It has the genes and inertia of thinking about change and innovation, with comprehensive business, extensive reach, and in - depth penetration into communities. Beike is the first to sense the industry's ups and downs.
Beike
01
Financial report data reflects the results of an enterprise's actions. Let's look back at Beike's layout and achievements in the past few years from the results:
In the first half of 2025, Beike's total transaction volume was 1.7224 trillion yuan (RMB, the same below), a year - on - year increase of 17.3%. Among them, the proportion of second - hand housing transactions was 67.57%, and the proportion of new housing transactions was 28.31%. Second - hand housing transactions remain Beike's most core business.
However, some changes can be seen from the perspective of revenue composition. In the first half of the year, Beike's net revenue was 49.3 billion yuan, a significant year - on - year increase of 24.1% compared with the same period in 2024.
Among them, the net revenue of the second - hand housing business was 13.6 billion yuan; the net revenue of the new housing business was 16.7 billion yuan, accounting for a larger proportion than the second - hand housing business; the net revenue of the home improvement and home furnishing business reached 7.5 billion yuan, and it will soon become another new business with a revenue of 10 billion yuan; the net revenue of the housing rental service business exceeded 10 billion yuan, reaching 10.8 billion yuan, an increase of 5 billion yuan compared with the same period last year.
The year - on - year growth rates of the above four major business revenues were 3.82%, 29.9%, 16.5%, and 85.2% respectively.
There is also another business worth looking forward to - Beijiahao. In the second half of this year, the first self - operated new housing project of Beijiahao will enter the market, opening up the imagination and performance growth space of the C2M model.
We can draw a conclusion: Beike's new businesses laid out in recent years have become the main engine of revenue growth.
Financial report data shows that in Q2 of 2025, the proportion of Beike's net revenue from non - real estate transaction service businesses reached 41%, a record high.
Objectively speaking, the entire real estate market is still in the process of stopping the decline and stabilizing. Beike's performance has achieved reverse growth, relying on its own capabilities and forward - looking layout. Two data points can show the evolution of Beike's platform model capabilities:
The proportion of second - hand housing transaction orders on the platform to the total real estate trading orders on the Beike platform has been continuously increasing, gradually rising from 51% in the first half of 2021 to 76% in the first half of this year; on the Beike platform, the number of non - Lianjia brokers has increased significantly.
The increase in the proportion of GTV of non - Lianjia second - hand housing business means that Beike's platform model is playing an increasingly important role. The platform has become a "leveraged" ability, leveraging the market forces to play a greater synergistic effect, laying the foundation for Beike's reverse growth.
However, performance growth is only one aspect of Beike's growth. The other aspect is built for consumers.
02
At the earnings conference, Peng Yongdong, the co - founder, chairman, and CEO of Beike, responded to the basic logic of Beike's strategic adjustment: "In the previous era, high - quality assets and transaction security guarantees were the core scarce resources in the market. We built the ACN cooperation network, provided real housing sources and service commitments, and relied on the integration ability of online platform innovation and offline business execution and scientific management to support the implementation of ACN and real housing sources, provided scarce value, achieved scale breakthroughs, and built a deep moat. With the transformation of the Chinese real estate market, the new scarcity lies in 'the knowledge of buying the right house', 'the ability to operate and sell a house well', and 'the emotional value brought by empathizing with customers'. Consumers need professional advice to assist in decision - making, homeowners need someone to operate and market their houses, and in the face of AI, customers long for service providers to provide empathetic emotional value. We need to establish a path to provide these values."
After 2018, there was a turning - point change in the environment of the real estate market. Beike was officially established during this turning period. Although it received the dividends of the real estate market growth in the early stage, as an enterprise born out of the transformation from the traditional model, Beike felt the market changes more deeply.
The market changes mainly show two trends: First, the market structure has changed from incremental to stock, and the market capacity has changed from growth to contraction. Enterprises can no longer rely on "expanding the market" to achieve simultaneous increases in revenue and efficiency. Efficiency and synergy have become more important; Second, the buyer's market environment has been formed. Consumers' decisions and experiences have become more important and precious. For enterprises, it is still important to occupy resources such as housing sources and land, but establishing connections with consumers and capturing consumers' minds have become the necessary conditions for building an enterprise's ecological closed - loop.
One of the main reasons for the rapid growth of Beike's new housing transaction business is that it is closer to consumers. Therefore, the most fundamental reason for Beike's strategic layout upgrade from "one - body" to "three - wing" is to establish more contact points and connection opportunities around consumers.
For example, in the home improvement and home furnishing business, Beike has changed the "advertising - passive business" model of traditional home improvement enterprises in at least three dimensions. First, through the basic market of real estate transaction business, Beike's home improvement business can "see" users' needs in advance during the house - viewing stage, reducing the promotion difficulty of the home improvement business.
Second, in the process from real estate transactions to home improvement, Beike has not simply "transferred" business opportunities. Instead, it has explored the synergistic points between the two links and upgraded services around consumers' needs. During the connection process, the living needs, pain points, and living habits of consumers learned by brokers, as well as the information about the house's structure, lighting, and prone - to - occur problems accumulated on the platform, are synchronized to the home improvement link. Home improvement has become the "after - sales service" of transactions, and the transaction process has become the "customer insight" for the home improvement business.
In the third dimension, Beike has been exploring ways to get closer to consumers. The home improvement business implements the "business district intensive cultivation" strategy, allowing service providers such as designers and project managers to focus on specific business districts, deeply accumulating knowledge of house types and customer groups.
Peng Yongdong has a relatively complete explanation for this: "Our fundamental judgment is that a trend has become increasingly obvious, that is, the transformation from traffic thinking to community thinking of business district intensive cultivation. We have started to explore such a model in Beijing. In our whole - house decoration product boutique museum in Beijing, we have set up sample rooms of real home improvement cases based on typical house types in the community and modular home improvement products... The core logic is to 'dig deep roots'. At the bottom, we hope to infinitely shorten the physical distance, psychological distance, and decision - making distance between'service' and 'users', so that the business can evolve from a 'city - level' decoration service provider to a 'community - level' deeply - bound partner... enabling one - time 'transaction customers' to be transformed into long - term interactive 'community users'."
Therefore, Beike has upgraded from a transaction - based company to a full - chain "good living" service company. The essence of the "one - body three - wing" strategy is to build a one - stop service model around consumers. For consumers, it becomes the first - choice in different transaction links; for Beike itself, through business synergy, it can comprehensively improve personnel efficiency, store efficiency, platform efficiency, and management efficiency.
In addition, real estate and home improvement are both low - frequency transactions. Only with sufficient rich scenarios, service depth, user volume, and long - term processes can it be possible to obtain dividends from technology. This is also one of the main reasons why only Beike can succeed in the platform model in this field.
Beike also uses AI deeply in each service link to improve service experience and operational efficiency. In the real estate transaction business, for the B - end, "Laike", one of the applications of Beike's AI CRM intelligent agent, helps brokers understand users, detect users' intentions, and improve customer acquisition and conversion capabilities. As of the end of June 2025, more than 335,000 brokers have been using it. For the C - end, the AI online service assistant "Buddy" can provide services such as real estate market analysis, city - wide house search, regional analysis, housing source comparison, and preliminary broker recommendation matching in the form of online Q&A. It was launched in some cities in May, and in July, the number of "Buddy" conversations increased by 59% month - on - month, and the average usage time per person increased by 14%.
In the housing rental business, based on the digital accumulation of "field - based" non - standard housing products established by Beike on the housing source side, it has now started to comprehensively build the ability to drive business with intelligence, implementing the "AI + human" collaborative operation mode, such as guiding the standardized collection of house condition data through shooting, intelligent pricing, AI review, and AI cloud butler, allowing AI to handle more standardized work and enabling service providers to focus on building trust, handling complex exceptions, and providing high - quality services.
It can be seen from the above that many of Beike's actions are aimed at upgrading from transaction services to living services and deepening the moat of service capabilities around the "good living" chain.
03
Transitions will always produce transition periods and corresponding stage - specific costs. In the living field, the pressure of the market downturn has been added. These two points have magnified people's attention to the stage - specific decline in Beike's profitability in the first half of the year.
However, if we break down the factors affecting profitability, we will find that this is the "price of growth" for Beike.
Announcement data shows that in the first half of 2025, Beike's gross profit was 10.5 billion yuan, a slight year - on - year decrease of 100 million yuan; the net profit was 2.162 billion yuan, a decrease of 170 million yuan compared with the same period last year; the gross profit margin was 21.3%, while it was 26.8% in the same period in 2024.
The main reason for the decline in the profit margin comes from the structural change in the composition of revenue sources. First, the proportion of new housing transaction revenue exceeds 50%. The gross profit margin of the new housing business (about 25%) is significantly lower than that of second - hand housing transactions (over 40%). At the same time, Beike implemented an ecological profit - sharing strategy last year, which drove business revenue growth but reduced profitability. This is an inevitable result "synchronized" with the industry environment.
Another point is that in Beike's revenue composition, the proportion of non - real estate transaction business is gradually increasing. However, the home improvement and Beijiahao businesses are still in the stage of promoting model and service experience upgrades through investment. The growth potential of the businesses is relatively strong, but the proportion of pre - investment is also relatively large. There is a relatively large "layout cost" in the short term, which needs to be measured from a higher strategic dimension and a longer time line.
From the perspective of the cost of the core business, one of the main costs, the store cost, was 1.4 billion yuan in the first half of 2024 and 1.5 billion yuan in 2025. On the premise of a 31.77% growth rate in the number of stores, the corresponding cost growth is not obvious. The aggregation effect of the platform model is evident, reflecting Beike's management ability for a mature business.
In contrast, the cost of the home improvement and home furnishing business increased from 4.4 billion yuan in the first half of 2024 to 5.1 billion yuan in the same period this year, an increase of 25%, exceeding the corresponding revenue scale growth rate. The fundamental reason is that the upgrade of Beike's home improvement and home furnishing business model requires a certain amount of investment to improve customer experience and replace the old model.
At the same time, there is another notable comparison in Beike's financial report data: Administrative expenses decreased by 3.5% in the first half of the year, sales and marketing expenses increased slightly by 4.7%, and the most significant increase was in R & D expenses, which increased from 1 billion yuan in the first half of 2024 to 1.2 billion yuan in the same period this year, a growth rate of 20%.
Beike is one of the companies that best combines technology with products and services in the large living industry. In the era of AI, it is still willing to increase investment to find new solutions, which is a characteristic that differentiates Beike from traditional enterprises.
Peng Yongdong said, "Large organizations seem to naturally sacrifice efficiency for scale. Now we are going to challenge this paradox, and this is the starting point of our new growth paradigm. We can see that there are driving forces for efficiency improvement now. One is the natural screening brought about by the change in customer needs, and the other is the productivity improvement brought about by innovation led by AI. As a new means of production, AI is increasingly replacing the original means of production in the production relationship. All these provide the possibility of improving efficiency while keeping the scale of people and stores relatively stable."
It can be seen that Beike has proven with performance data that it has the ability to achieve reverse growth, the willingness to actively seek change, and the action to exchange investment and reform for future growth space. It is a one - stop new living service platform that takes "good living" as its corporate strategy and formulates clear business goals based on this. Therefore, Beike is a company that has made early arrangements for the future in the new stage.