Jack Ma gets a good laugh over announcing yet another big name deal just days before his IPO
Just in case Alibaba’s Jack Ma needed another win before his ecommerce giant launches its IPO next week, one of China’s biggest real estate agencies announced this week that it has begun selling houses on his group’s Taobao B2C platform.
Century 21 China Real Estate announced on September 10th that its Shanggu subsidiary has begun listing homes and holding online property auctions on Taobao.
The victory for Taobao comes only a few weeks after China Vanke, the country’s largest developer by sales, began offering discounts of up to $325,000 to top users of Taobao who bought new homes.
Century 21 Finds New Platform After Soufun Spat
Century 21 China, which is a franchise of the well-known US chain, last month joined a number of other large real estate agencies in pulling their listings from China’s biggest real estate website, Soufun.com. The boycott of the giant real estate site was sparked by disputes over what the agencies termed unfair pricing by Soufun.
In the announcement of its new tie-up with Taobao, however, Century 21 only wanted to talk about the future.
“Shanggu’s expansion onto Taobao is a big step forward for Century 21 China Real Estate’s growing O2O offering,” said Donald Zhang, chairman and chief executive officer of Century 21 China Real Estate. “With its deep market knowledge, we look forward to Shanggu helping more buyers find the right property more quickly and efficiently, while giving developers another platform to promote their brands and reach more customers.”
In migrating over to Taobao, Century 21 says that it will hold its online auctions in cooperation with property consulting company Fangpaipai, as well as offering traditional listings.
Under Vanke’s promotion with Taobao, the Shenzhen-based developer announced that it would grant discounts of up to RMB 2 million on select properties if the home buyer spent more than 2 million yuan on Taobao in the last year. Homebuyers who had spent as little as one renminbi on Taobao will be eligible for a RMB 50,000 rebate on a new home purchase.
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