Will corporate apartments, whose branded chain penetration rate is less than 5%, become the next "outlet" in the long-term rental market?
In the past two years, the job market has become increasingly severe. To compete for talents, enterprises have raised their stakes in salary, equity incentives, paid leave, flexible working systems and other aspects. But when it comes to actual implementation, providing free food and accommodation turns out to be the most direct and practical benefit. However, the reality is that even a large number of companies that offer accommodation cannot guarantee a decent living environment, which even plays the opposite role of discouraging employees from staying. Enterprises want to retain talents but cannot provide good welfare, while employees want to live in peace but cannot get a nice place to stay — this pain point has always stood between employers and employees.
As the demand arises, a huge market gap is being opened up.
Recently, Jin Jiang Hotels (China) officially launched the Tuling Apartments and Lingju Apartments at a press conference. This is not the debut of the two products — Tuling Apartments was unveiled as early as two years ago, and the first store of Lingju Apartments opened seven months ago. Why did Jin Jiang choose to "re-release" these two products at this moment? Why did it bet on the two "Ling" branded corporate apartments at the same time? Compared with the increasingly competitive white-collar apartment market, the corporate apartment track, a long-forgotten lowland, seems to be finally noticed...
Entering the track, betting on the blue ocean with less than 5% share
The two major apartment brands launched by Jin Jiang Hotels (China) have their own focuses. Tuling Apartments targets the enterprise side, providing accommodation solutions for employees of labor-intensive enterprises such as hotels, catering, express logistics, and medical institutions, and has opened 6 projects so far. The complementary Lingju Apartments focuses on 19 to 48 square meters of single apartments with multiple unit types.
For enterprises, the room type design of the two brands basically covers the main accommodation needs of their employees. For Jin Jiang, which has long been deeply involved in the hotel track, the internal capabilities accumulated in the hotel industry can be empowered to the corporate apartment sector, including member resources, channels, supply chain, digitalization and management systems.
At the same time, more and more enterprises choose to entrust professional institutions to operate employee accommodation. Taking large technology companies as examples, the Xiaomi Youth Apartments built in Beijing, Wuhan and other places are operated in cooperation with Vanke Port Apartment; the customized employee apartments at the headquarters of Xpeng Motors in Guangzhou are operated by Guangzhou Anju Group...
Just like the development path of the long-term rental apartment industry, the employee dormitory segment is also bidding farewell to the old profit model relying on information asymmetry, and turning to a new stage of professional operation and value-added services.
On the surface, Jin Jiang is extending its business to the long-term rental apartment sector, but in essence, it is betting on a huge market that has been ignored for a long time — corporate accommodation.
According to statistics, China has 900 million workers, 400 million of whom are blue-collar workers with accommodation needs, but the brand chain rate of corporate apartments is less than 5%.
What does this mean? It means that the vast majority of blue-collar workers still live in shared rental housing, urban villages, basements, or simple dormitories built by enterprises themselves. While serviced apartments and serviced-style apartments have all set their sights on the white-collar apartment market, the "blue ocean" of corporate apartments is almost still waiting to be developed.
Jin Jiang's entry into this market at this moment is based on multiple considerations:
On the one hand, it benefits from the favorable policy environment. "Ensuring everyone has a place to live and a good place to live" has become a national-level people's livelihood call, and the policy on affordable rental housing continues to make efforts. As a main starting point to solve the housing problem of citizens and young people, corporate apartments are naturally policy-friendly.
On the other hand, its financial model is more optimized. Compared with white-collar apartments targeting individual tenants, the TO B attribute of corporate apartments brings stronger certainty. Corporate customers have long lease terms, strong payment capacity and rational decision-making. Even if there are vacant beds, the rent is still borne by the enterprise, and the cash flow stability is far better than that of the C-end business.
The most critical point is that for hotel groups, entering the corporate apartment track seems to be cross-border operation, but in fact it is dimensionality reduction strike. The supply chain integration capability, standardized operation system, PMS system, linen management, 24-hour security and other capabilities accumulated in the hotel industry highly match the needs of corporate apartments.
Looking at the entire long-term rental apartment industry, the market chain rate of corporate apartments is not high, but Jin Jiang is not the first to eat the crab.
From "Dancing Alone" to "Competing for the Market"
Anxin Apartments is a well-deserved pioneer on the corporate apartment track.
As the first one-stop corporate employee dormitory solution operator in China, it has been deeply engaged in the B-end market since its establishment in 2012. Its first store was located near Shanghai Railway Station, establishing a B2B mode with "corporate employee dormitory" as the entry point, focusing on solving the accommodation pain points of front-line employees in catering, logistics and other industries.
Later, the group took this as the keynote, established "Anxin·YU" as the group brand, and formed four product lines: Leju, Zhiju, Meiyu and Pinyu, which respectively target front-line employees, industrial workers in parks, middle-level white-collar workers of enterprises, enterprise executives and business travelers, initially improving the product matrix.
After that, the group acquired "Comma Apartment", a long-term rental apartment brand under BTG Homeinns, to formally enter the white-collar apartment market. It also successively acquired "Yiqi Zu" and "New Starting Point Apartment", and took shares in "Nuochao·Guyu" to expand its business territory.
However, later affected by the downward macro economy, the operating difficulties of some core industry customers and the squeezed market space, it gradually divested non-core businesses and returned to the core corporate apartment track.
The brand has served customers covering catering, hotels, aviation, logistics and express delivery, call centers and other industries, with more than 2000 enterprise customers. At present, Anxin's overall business covers 29 cities across the country, with about 220 stores and about 130,000 beds. However, even for a leading brand like Anxin, the scale of its managed beds is still a drop in the bucket compared with the accommodation needs of 400 million blue-collar workers.
Mofang, which has been deployed in the long-term rental apartment sector for a long time, launched its B-end product line "Mofang Building 9" in 2013, which is a customized apartment product for corporate employees. After the launch of this product, the blue-collar apartment policies in Hangzhou, Beijing and other places broke the ice in 2018. Over the past decade, its business has covered 10 cities, serving about 8000 corporate customers and managing tens of thousands of beds. Its customer list includes leading enterprises such as SF Express, Deppon, InterContinental and Sheraton, and it has withstood the impact of large-scale rent withdrawal of catering customers during the epidemic.
Ten years later, the total number of rooms managed by Mofang Building 9 has exceeded 8000, providing rental services for more than 40,000 employees of nearly 500 enterprises. However, the operation of Mofang Apartments took a sharp turn for the worse last year, and many stores faced contract termination by property owners. As of June 2026, its available housing units have been reduced to only 27,900, down 67% from 84,300 in October 2025. The corporate apartment business derived from the C-end flagship brand has also been more or less affected.
Real estate-backed brands are also unwilling to lag behind. Longfor GuanYu, CIFI Lingyu, China Merchants Yidun, CR Youchao, Country Garden Bijia, Vanke Port Apartment and other brands, after launching their long-term rental apartment businesses, have opened up the B-end track and launched customized employee products to expand their business branches in the face of intensified involution in the C-end market.
In recent years, the cooperation between real estate-backed apartment brands and large enterprises has become more and more frequent. For example, Longfor GuanYu has joined hands with Haier, and Vanke Port Apartment has cooperated with Xiaomi. Although large enterprises have huge employee accommodation needs, strong capital strength and brand endorsement, they lack professional capabilities in apartment design, construction and refined operation; while real estate-backed brands have advantages in land resources, construction technology, product design and operation experience, and the two sides are just complementary.
It is worth noting that the core battlefield of these brands is still the white-collar apartment market, and corporate apartments are just a new SKU added to their original product lines. Higher safety management standards, more complex bed operation modes, and stronger enterprise customized demands together form the natural entry barrier of the corporate apartment track. In this huge market with a chain rate of less than 5%, there are not many competitors that actually operate corporate apartments as independent brands, excluding those derivative projects and sub-brands.
From the perspective of market pattern, the corporate apartment sector is still in a "scattered, small and disorderly" stage. A large number of enterprise employees, like Xiao Jie, still live in scattered shared rental housing, self-built dormitories of enterprises or urban village reconstruction houses with uneven conditions, and the proportion of branded products operated by professional institutions is extremely low. There used to be only a few corporate apartment brands in the market, but now there are more and more players, and this market is evolving from "dancing alone" to "competing for dominance".
The branding of corporate apartments has just started
To judge the future potential of the corporate apartment market, the best reference is the mature overseas markets.
A set of data released at the press conference shows that the institutionalization proportion of China's housing rental market is only 8%-10%, while that of the European Union is 35%-40%, the United States is about 50%, and Japan is as high as about 80%. This means that China's long-term rental apartment market, including corporate apartments, is still in the early stage of transition from "scattered individual landlords" to "professional institutional operation".
Greystar in the United States is one of the largest light asset managers in the world, managing more than 1.1 million apartments and beds, which mainly adopts the mode of stock apartment assets + enterprise customer channels + flexible rental premium to enhance asset value; Japan's Daito Trust Construction manages about 1.26 million housing units through the mode of agency + trusteeship + full lease, and Leopalace21 manages about 540,000 housing units, and the demand for enterprise customers and employee dormitories is an important business scenario for them.
From the development track of these overseas giants, it is not difficult to see the future development trend of China's corporate apartment market.
First, the process of chain and branding is accelerating. Frost & Sullivan predicts that the proportion of chain brands in China's centralized long-term rental apartments will rise to 50.1% in 2026, and will further increase by 2030. Corporate apartments are a sub-sector with a low chain rate, and there is huge room for branding. With the acceleration of the globalization process of Chinese enterprises, the accommodation pain points of employees' overseas business trips, expatriate assignments and foreign trade business have become increasingly prominent, and the service radius of corporate accommodation is extending from domestic to the global market.
At present, traditional short-term business trips are still mainly based on hotels, but with the extension of the project cycle of overseas enterprises, the expansion of team scale and the intensification of cost pressure, hotels are no longer the only "standard answer" — more and more enterprises are including accommodation modes such as serviced apartments and corporate apartments into their procurement lists. It is very likely that the corporate apartment brands that have gained a firm foothold in China will expand their business to the broader international market in the future.
Second, "hotel-backed" players will become an important variable. More and more hotel and cultural tourism groups are entering the centralized long-term rental apartment sector, bringing not only funds, but also mature operation systems and service standards. Jin Jiang is not the first one, nor will it be the last one.
Nowadays, the hotel industry has entered a stage of stock competition, and the property income in core areas is under pressure. The apartment brands under hotel groups have high-quality property resources of their parent companies, and naturally have advantages in site selection and assets. In addition, the huge hotel member system can be directly converted into apartment customers, greatly reducing the customer acquisition cost — Tuling Apartments, relying on the group's more than 200,000 enterprise customer resources, has realized the situation that "customers are confirmed before the project is opened".
The collision between these hotel-backed brands and the original corporate apartment operators will affect the competition pattern of the industry.
Third, the industry will achieve the transition from "accommodation provider" to "human resource service ecosystem". Although Anxin started with employee dormitories, its business has now extended to human resource services such as RPO (recruitment outsourcing), BPO (business process outsourcing), post outsourcing, and gig worker outsourcing. It also has a special recruitment platform "Hi Recruitment", and its brand positioning has been upgraded from "employee accommodation expert" to "one-stop life and growth platform".
The logic of "integrating recruitment and accommodation" is very practical. The four pain points that enterprises may face, including that they have signed dormitory contracts but no employees to live in so they have to cancel the lease, that they have recruited employees but no accommodation for them, that they need to connect two different suppliers for recruitment and accommodation respectively, and that there is no guarantee when they need employees urgently, all exist in real scenarios.
In the future, corporate apartment operators are likely to no longer simply operate accommodation business, but become a key part of the enterprise's human resource service ecosystem.
The corporate apartment sector, this long-forgotten lowland, with a chain rate of less than 5% and the grand vision of 150,000 beds in the future, has already started the countdown to turn into a hot track. But the transformation from blue ocean to red ocean is not the focus. When corporate apartments really evolve from a "cost item" to a "talent strategy", and upgrade from "a bed" to "a warm light", the value of this market will be fully unlocked...
This article is from the WeChat official account "Space Insider", written by Qin Minhui, and authorized by 36Kr for release.