ByteDance Launches Real Estate and Home Decoration Services

ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of TikTok, has recently launched an offline real estate agency called “Xiaomai” for the Chinese market, opening several related stores in Fuzhou, Fujian Province. This new brand will also open physical locations in Lanzhou, Gansu Province, Foshan, Guangdong Province and Xiamen, Fujian Province, according to a report by Tech Planet on September 15.

Xiaomai mainly provides consumers with a variety of real estate brokerage services including second-hand housing sales and new housing sales. In addition, ByteDance’s aggregated decoration services business “Zhuxiaobang” has also launched a self-operated home decoration business called “Zhuhaojia,” opening online stores in the Zhuxiaobang app and offline stores in Chaoyang District, Beijing. The new service is currently available in Beijing and mainly provides home decoration for individual consumers in the city.

With the launch of Xiaomai, Zhuhaojia and other businesses in the field, ByteDance has now formed a complete business system for the home and living industry.

From the aggregated real estate information platform “Xingfuli,” to the offline housing brokerage service Xiaomai, as well as the one-stop home decoration service platform Zhuxiaobang and ByteDance’s self-operated decoration brand Zhuhaojia, users can complete one-stop services through ByteDance businesses.

SEE ALSO: ByteDance’s Real Estate Trading Platform Xingfuli Abolishes New House Salesmen

The real estate brokerage market is quite large. According to data released by Chinese research firm Zhongyan, in the past five years, the penetration rate of China’s real estate brokerage industry has increased from 33% to 47% while the sales scale of new houses has increased from 0.6 trillion yuan ($86.1 billion) to 3.6 trillion yuan ($516.5 billion). The scale of leasing transactions has increased from 0.3 trillion yuan to 0.9 trillion yuan.

In addition to the continuous expansion of market scale, the commission rate in the industry is also gradually increasing. From 2014 to 2019, the average cost rate of housing brokerage services in China increased by 20%, and the commission income increased from 63.6 billion yuan to 251.5 billion yuan. Although the real estate industry is now in the midst of a downward trend, the market is expected to increase with the support of various polices, which will help promote the development of the real estate brokerage market.