Lianjia
FormerlyHomelink
TypePrivate
IndustryReal estate
Founded2001
FounderZuo Hui
Area served
China
Number of employees
  • 30,000 (2014)
  • 16,000 (2012)
  • 27 (2001)
Websitem.lianjia.com
Footnotes / references
Number of Employees[1]

Lianjia (Chinese: 链家), formerly called Homelink, is a Chinese real-estate brokerage company founded in 2001. As of 2019, it had approximately 6,000 brokerage offices and more than 120,000 brokers.[2]

By the end of 2015, Lianjia had handled 700 billion yuan worth of real-estate transactions in total. In Beijing, it occupied 55-60% real-estate brokerage market. As of 2019, Lianjia had 51 subsidiaries, all related to the real-estate services, such as long-term rental apartment development, real-estate financing or decoration. By 2018, Lianjia' s market value had reached US$6 billion.[3]

History

Homelink was founded by Zuo Hui in November 2001 with an initial staff of 27 people.[1] On December 2, its first offline brokerage office was opened at "Tianshuiyuan".[4] In 2004, Homelink offered the strategy of "Non-price difference" and tried to reduce the price difference between the market price and trading price.[5] Homelink also developed its own financial center to operate its equity and built professional teams for warrant and loan services in 2005. In 2006, Homelink proposed the concept of "exclusive listing" which owners singularly entrust their property to the company on receiving the promise of a sale within a certain period. If the company fails to deliver the sale within that period, it returns the property to the seller along with the payment of liquidated damages."[6] Homelink launched its first online platform at lianjia.com.[7]

In September 2014, the company was noted as "Beijing's largest real estate agency by market share" with 52% of the market, at which point it had 1,500 branches in eight cities.[1] On October 24, 2014, Homelink stopped the cooperation with "Fang.com" and lost part of real-estate information and resources. But it changed its brand name to "Lianjia". In the same year, Homelink commenced two financial services. One is the third-party payment business "Lifangtong", which is responsible for fund trusteeship, and the other is a peer-to-peer (P2P) financial services "licailianjia". More specifically, "Lifangtong" has obtained a third-party payment license issued on July 15, 2015. Although it could guarantee the safety of the funds in the process of transactions, many people doubted it. The public focused on the suspected misappropriation of funds and the deregulation of housing funds. In 2015, the cumulative turnover of "licailianjia" reached 13.8 billion Chinese yuan, with approximately 320,000 investors. At the end of 2014, Homelink have merged real-estate intermediaries such as "Yicheng" in Chengdu, "Deyou" in Shanghai, "Yijia" in Beijing and so on to extend its market size. Started from 2016, the aim of Homelink in the next five years was to find more investors and cooperators, on April 6, Homelink completed 6 billion Chinese yuan external finance,[8] and on July 24, Ray White has signed an agreement to list newly built and pre-owned properties and cooperated its agency services with Homelink.[9] Lianjia will co-list Ray White's Australian and New Zealand properties and upload the housing information in Mandarin on its websites. Moreover, in September 2017, Lianjia signed a strategic investment agreement with Century 21 which meant that Lianjia hold 10% of fully diluted shares of Century 21.[10] On June 26, 2018, Lianjia signed with Gridsum Holding Inc, the leading provider of cloud-based big-data analytics and artificial intelligence. Gridsum Holding Inc. decided to provide a Marketing Automation to Homelink as its open-listing platforms in the future. The system will be used in Lianjia.com and Ke.com.[11] In the same year,September 5, Tencent decided to invest 1 billion US dollar to Homelink and cooperate with its core business in property brokerage.[12]

Awards

  • Top Ten Brand Institution Awards for Real Estate Brokerage Industry[13]
  • 3.15 Honesty Alliance Real Estate Agency[14]
  • Grade I Qualifications of Intermediary Service Institutions for Stock Housing in Beijing[15]
  • Vice President Firm of Beijing Real Estate Agency Association[16]

Controversies

Illegal lending

In February 2016, Lianjia was accused of suspected concealment of true information, luring and misleading uninformed consumers to buy problem houses. Moreover, Lianjia also offered illegal mortgage loans and breaching contracts to unwitting buyers. On February 24, The Consumer Insurance Commission[17] in Shanghai announced two illegal lending cases of Lianjia, including illegal sales of mortgage houses. After the supervision, all so-called "financial products" were suspended from February 24 and the funds in P2P platform were supervised by the third party.[18] The manager of Homelink proposed the improvement of the management system and returned all the consumers' payment back.

Formaldehyde levels

In December 2017, some of the Ziroom rental houses under Lianjia were suspected of exceeding the formaldehyde standard.[19] It caused many tenants felt headaches and coughs. According to the national standard, the maximum indoor formaldehyde concentration is 0.1 mg/m3,[20] but the tests has shown that the indoor formaldehyde concentration in Ziroom living room reached 1.018 mg/m3. Ziroom announced that consumers were able to ask all the rents back or change other services at any time. Alternatively, Ziroom will provide free air purifiers for 90 days.[21][22]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Man-Ki, Kwong (13 September 2014). "Homelink plans course correction to ride out China's property downturn". South China Morning Post. SCMP Group. Retrieved 30 Dec 2019.
  2. ↑ "Success Story: Lianjia.com". Genesys. 2019. Retrieved 2019-05-06.
  3. ↑ Sharma, Yanogya (10 August 2018). "How Lianjia leveraged Internet to evolve as $6 Bn online real estate company in China".
  4. ↑ "24个城市，7000亿交易额 "巨兽"链家 - 南方周末". www.infzm.com.
  5. ↑ Leju (2018). "传链家20亿美元融资计划受挫：华平投资集团宣布退出，腾讯暂未表态". Retrieved 2019-05-20.
  6. ↑ Yanogya Sharma (2018). "How Lianjia leveraged Internet to evolve as $6 Bn online real estate company in China". Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  7. ↑ "链家董事长左晖:别的中介抢不走自己的经纪人-公司要闻-公司报道-中国网地产". house.china.com.cn.
  8. ↑ "链家完成60亿元融资 百度腾讯同时成为投资方". tech.ifeng.com.
  9. ↑ "Ray White launches in China with Lianjia". Australian Financial Review. 21 July 2016.
  10. ↑ "Lianjia to hold 10% of Century 21 China's franchise". 2017. Retrieved 2019-05-20.
  11. ↑ "Gridsum Signs Lianjia as New Client". Gridsum Holding. 2018. Retrieved 2019-05-20.
  12. ↑ Steinberg, Julie; Lin, Liza (6 September 2018). "Tencent Bets $1 Billion on China Housing Boom With Stake in Property Brokerage". www.wsj.com.
  13. ↑ "Beijing Consumer Association". 2019. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  14. ↑ "315". State administration for industry & commerce of the people's republic of China consumer protection bureau. 2019. Archived from the original on 2001-11-17. Retrieved 2019-05-20.
  15. ↑ "北京房地产中介行业协会评定2005年度存量房中介服务机构等级". Beijing municipal commission of housing and urban-rural development. 2005. Retrieved 2019-05-20.
  16. ↑ "China institute of real estate appraisers and agents". cirea.org. 2019. Retrieved 2019-05-20.
  17. ↑ "China country brief". Australian Government. 2019. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  18. ↑ "链家董事长宣布整改措施:绝不碰"自融"这条红线". 2016. Archived from the original on 2016-04-22. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  19. ↑ "formaldehyde standard". ohsrep.org. 2015. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  20. ↑ Chang, Tian (2017). "Retrieved from Indoor Air Pollution Levels in Decorated Residences and Public Places over Xi'an, China" (PDF). doi:10.4209/AAQR.2016.12.0542. S2CID 53575754. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-05-09. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  21. ↑ ""自如"甲醛超标，链家"工匠精神"哪去了". xinhuanet.com. 2017. Archived from the original on May 9, 2019. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  22. ↑ Wang Keju (2018). "App removes apartments over air quality concerns". Retrieved 2019-05-10.

Further reading

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