Young people who do not want real estate agents to pocket the price difference and choose to buy houses from other netizens "save 1,000 yuan per hour"
Nowadays, on social media platforms, a growing number of young people are bypassing real estate agents to buy and sell properties directly on their own.
Saving money is a sure thing, but getting peace of mind is far from guaranteed. Cutting out intermediaries means you have to handle everything personally: you need to identify fake listings by yourself, take time off work to run administrative procedures, and even accept the situation where the bank's low appraisal forces you to pay tens of thousands of yuan more for the down payment.
The real estate agency industry is visibly shrinking, but direct property transactions are far from a guaranteed easy win. There is no standard answer yet to the trade-off between saving money and taking on extra hassle, but more and more new buyers who are fed up with the endless haggling process are eager to give it a try.
"I heard selling a house on Xiaohongshu is very fast, so the homeowner decided to give it a shot in person."
If you have come across posts like this, you need to stay alert, because the algorithm will probably recommend more similar content to you later. You will see countless charming homes, whose photos are usually taken by the homeowners themselves, with descriptions full of their affection for the properties, and the prices may even seem surprisingly attractive.
But soon, just like many netizens, you will realize that what you lack is not the ability to appreciate nice houses.
Nice houses are each charming in their own way, but my tight budget is exactly the same as that of other netizens. (Screenshot from Xiaohongshu)
Earlier this year, a netizen posted a question online: "Why are there so many houses sold directly by homeowners on Xiaohongshu now? Would you dare to buy one?"
Many people in the comment section shared their real experiences, saying that agency fees are too high, and selling or buying directly can save a large sum of money without being as unreliable as people imagine. Some pointed out that agents always persuade homeowners to cut prices when selling properties, while selling by themselves can help homeowners get a more ideal price. On the other hand, from the perspective of potential buyers, homeowners who choose to sell their properties directly often have overly high expectations, and their listed prices are usually higher than the market value.
Data released by the National Bureau of Statistics of China at a relevant press conference on July 15 this year shows that some positive changes have taken place in the real estate market in the first half of the year. Since March, the sales prices of new commercial residential properties and second-hand residential properties in first-tier cities have risen month-on-month for four consecutive months. From March to June, the month-on-month growth rate of new commercial residential property prices in first-tier cities ranged from 0.1% to 0.2%, and that of second-hand residential properties ranged from 0.3% to 0.4%. In addition, the current transaction volume of second-hand houses is already comparable to the sales volume of new houses.
More and more homeowners are starting to post their property listings on social media platforms by themselves. (Screenshots from Weibo, Xiaohongshu and Douyin)
Property transactions are rising, but the number of real estate agents is decreasing. Take Beike Zhaofang as an example. As of June 30, 2026, it has about 540,000 agents and 450,000 active agents, down 3.1% and 7.5% year on year respectively. The 2026 Survival Report for Millions of Real Estate Agents recently released by 58.com and Anjuke shows that the average transaction output per agent dropped by 18% in 2025, while the number of real estate agencies and stores decreased by 5.6% and 6.8% respectively.
For many buyers, the main venue for house hunting has shifted from sales offices to living rooms, and homeowners are no longer satisfied with passively waiting for agents to pass on messages, test intentions and negotiate prices. Both buyers and sellers are starting to step onto the negotiation table in person.
No matter how the market performs, homeowners who want to trade up their properties and buyers who still want to get on the property ladder are obviously exploring lower-cost transaction methods. However, how much money they can actually earn or save is not as easy to calculate as they thought.
01
"The conversion rate of agents is 0,
I sold my house online all by myself"
Lao Li sold her apartment in Guangzhou for 1.69 million yuan, only 40,000 yuan less than what she paid for it in 2018, which is considered a smooth deal in today's second-hand housing market.
Lao Li is a post-90s generation. After working for ten years, she is about to return to campus life this autumn after a long break. In May this year, she was admitted to the MPA program of Fudan University. Before going to school, how to deal with this small apartment in Guangzhou became a priority to consider. At that time, a friend happened to talk to her about the idea of selling a house, and Lao Li made up her mind to try direct selling.
She acted immediately and listed the house the next day. At first, she did not entrust the house to any agent, but posted a note on Xiaohongshu just to give it a try. It is a 57-square-meter one-bedroom, one-living room apartment, small but fully functional. Lao Li spent 150,000 yuan on decoration, and the furniture was arranged warmly and neatly, with an open kitchen and a wet-dry separated bathroom. She took live photos of all these details and showed them in her post.
Lao Li's apartment is very cozy. (Photo provided by the interviewee)
Most of her copywriting referred to other house-selling notes. Knowing that many people hope for good luck, she specially added a sentence at the end: "After moving in, I got promotion and salary raise, and was admitted to Fudan University as a postgraduate."
Unexpectedly, this account with only three-digit followers received a wave of unexpected traffic. Two notes with the same content were posted less than a week apart, with 32,000 and 47,000 views respectively, and both got hundreds of likes and one or two hundred comments.
Someone once asked her in the comment section: "Are you considering renting it out?" Lao Li replied: "I will rent it out if I can't sell it." In fact, Lao Li thinks that keeping in touch with tenants continuously is too troublesome, and she has already decided to solve the problem once and for all. What's more, although the monthly mortgage payment is not high, it is still "a bit restrictive". Now she prefers the free life of renting an apartment.
Similar stories are happening on multiple social platforms, not just Xiaohongshu. (Screenshot from social media platform)
Lao Li could only judge whether the other party is reliable through the content of the chat. Among the people who sent her private messages, there were more than a dozen who obviously wanted to know about the house sincerely. There were of course scammers, but Lao Li was very alert. She ignored the two strangers who claimed to work in large tech companies and had the ability to buy the house with full payment, but asked to communicate through unknown software.
"Actually, most people won't ask too many questions. If they are really interested, they will want to see the house as soon as possible, so we don't talk much online," Lao Li said. When communicating in person, to eliminate each other's concerns, both sides would show their ID cards to each other, and Lao Li would also show the other party the property ownership certificate.
Before showing the house, Lao Li would tidy up the room to make it look more pleasant. "I think not only on Xiaohongshu, but on any platform, beautifully decorated houses are easier to sell." Every time she showed the house, she would make clear all the key information of the apartment: orientation, house type, water and electricity conditions, as well as the furniture and appliances she was willing to leave to the buyer. Since it was on the top floor, she expected buyers to care about whether it was hot in summer, so she carefully explained that she added a heat insulation layer during decoration.
Homeowners know best the selling points of their own houses. (Screenshot from Modern Family)
But buying a house is just like decorating one: it really takes a lot of effort to find the right person among countless demands, which is also one of the reasons why agents exist. Lao Li still remembers that a couple was very interested at first, but after seeing that the apartment was converted from a two-bedroom to a one-bedroom, and it would take a lot of trouble to change it back, they gave up. Of course, most potential buyers did not proceed further, mainly because of the price. Lao Li knows very well: "After all, it is an old community built in 2004, it is very difficult to sell it without losing money."
For the initial listing price, she set it relatively high at 1.98 million yuan, based on two references: the 1.73 million yuan purchase price in 2018, and the transaction price of nearby houses recently. Shortly after posting on Xiaohongshu, Lao Li also found an agent to help sell the house. The agent advised her to reduce the price to 1.6 million yuan. "The agent probably knows at what price level the house can be sold quickly, but this price is far below my psychological expectation."
Today, there are still many people who want to own a house of their own. (Screenshot from The Rose's Story)
Later, Lao Li gradually reduced the price to 1.75 million yuan, but "the conversion rate on the agent's side was 0, and no buyer came to see the house." On the contrary, the buyer found through the social platform came to the final price negotiation step. It only took more than ten days from the first private message to the signing of the contract. The other party was a girl about the same age as her, who wanted to have her own small home after working for many years, just like Lao Li in the past. The house was finally sold for 1.69 million yuan.
Calculated, Lao Li sold the house in just over a month. Apart from the 150,000 yuan sunk cost of decoration, the extra tens of thousands of yuan she lost was regarded as the "rent" for living there for more than six years.
After learning that she had successfully sold the house, the agent congratulated her frankly: "The price is pretty good." Lao Li knows that this "pretty good" is the standard wording of agents, but for herself, the real cost-effective part is not that she sold the house at a good price, but that she avoided the agency fee, as well as the time and energy spent on layers of message passing and haggling.
02
Agents introduce the house, homeowners introduce the life
The house that the agent gave up after one negotiation was successfully closed by Oreo and Qiuqiu themselves, at a price even lower than that negotiated by the agent.
Different from Lao Li, Oreo is a first-time home buyer who came well prepared — he never planned to hand over the whole house buying process to agents completely from the very beginning.
He was born in 1995, and his girlfriend Qiuqiu is three years younger than him. In the first half of 2025, when Oreo and Qiuqiu planned to get married, they decided to buy a house in Chongqing where they settled down. "After all, it's for our own living, and we need to get married, so we have to buy a house."
After making the decision, they were also mentally prepared that the house would "lose value as soon as they get the property right", and the only problem was "how much they would lose".
At the beginning, the two were not familiar with the real estate in their ideal area, so they first found an agent to help introduce and show houses. One agent emphasized his professional competence, and said words like "without an agent, the buyer's funds may not be guaranteed, especially when encountering complex situations such as mortgaged houses". But Oreo did not agree with the other party's statement. He thinks that risks exist objectively no matter whether there is an agent or not. If he is cheated, he will have to argue with the agent afterwards anyway.
In the eyes of some