JD.com boss Richard Liu is looking for more real estate opportunities
The real estate unit of mainland e-commerce giant JD.com says it is teaming up with more than 200 Chinese property developers to offer homes at half their market value for the Singles’ Day online shopping festival coming up next month.
The Beijing-based online retail platform revealed the discounted home sales program at its at its inaugural technology and real estate summit in Shanghai this past week saying that the promotion which centres on 11 November, a day known as Singles’ Day for its set of consecutive 1 numerals, would include homes in 70 mainland cities.
The announcement of the real estate program, which JD.com says will provide 50 percent discounts on 6,000 homes worth more than RMB 300 million ($42.37 million), came at an event where the e-commerce giant founded by Richard Liu Qiangdong unveiled plans to open a chain of offline stores to help developers promote properties listed on the company’s website.
Promoting Home Sales Through VR-Powered Storefronts
JD’s leadership did not reveal details of specific homes being made available on China’s Singles’ Day, which now outranks Black Friday in the US as the biggest shopping orgy in the world, according to some highly elastic statistics promoted by JD’s rivals at Alibaba who originated the event.
JD is getting its property section ready for Singles’ Day
The Beijing-based company’s representatives went into more detail regarding their plans for the chain of brick-and-mortar stores, called Haofang Jingxuan, which are being set up to allow prospective homebuyers to view available homes and development projects through virtual reality or augmented reality systems.
“Haofang Jingxuan allows property purchases to become part of shopping activity and will enable users to instantly gain a sense of unit layouts, project surrounding and amenities,” Fu Huadong, general manager of Haofang Jingxuan said at the event.
JD Moves into Property Management Tech
In addition to its property sales applications, JD also said that it plans to use its Internet of Things technology to provide solutions for developers and property management firms.
These company’s representatives said that JD is making available systems which integrate software, hardware and services which allow for smarter environmental controls, security, transport, energy consumption and service management while also allowing building owners and operators to gather spatial intelligence data on how their buildings are used.
“Based on our big data analysis of JD.com users, we can understand what type of properties they like or how they want to decorate the rooms and can then offer targeted products and services, Zhou Jiong, general manager of Internet of Things systems at JD.com said. “This will allow developers to improve their sales efficiency and better prepare them to offer value-added services.”
E-commerce Player Looks for More Real Estate Opportunities
JD.com first stepped into the real estate market in October 2017, when the technology giant created a property section – xinfang.jd.com — on its online retail website. Last October, the company announced a partnership with one of China’s biggest housing brokers, 5i5j, to make it easier for the nearly 500,000 monthly visitors to China’s second largest e-commerce player to buy and lease homes online.
In July of this year, JD.com teamed up with Internet security provider Qihoo 360 Technology to buy a combined HK$491 million ($62.87 million) stake in Shenzhen-based residential property manager Colour Life, providing tech-enabled property management to residents of more than 1.12 billion square meters (12 billion square feet) of housing across 268 Chinese cities.
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