KE Holdings Inc.
NYSE:BEKE
$ 13.73
+ $0.47 (3.73%)
$ 13.73
+ $0.47 (3.73%)
Real-time: 03/27/2024 10:07

KE Holdings Stock

About KE Holdings

KE Holdings Inc. (Beike) operates as an integrated online and offline platform for housing transactions and services. The company is a pioneer in building the industry infrastructure and standards in China to reinvent how service providers and customers efficiently navigate and complete housing transactions and services, ranging from existing and new home sales, home rentals, to home renovation and furnishing, and other services. In 2022, the company facilitated approximately 3.8 million housing transactions on its platform with an aggregate GTV of RMB2,609.6 billion. KE Holdings share price history

The company has four main revenue streams, namely existing home transaction services, new home transaction services, home renovation and furnishing, and emerging and other services. For existing home transaction services, the company generates revenues from its own Lianjia brand where it charges commissions for existing home sales and home rentals, and split of commissions from other brokerage firms that operate brokerage stores on its Beike platform in collaboration with Lianjia agents to complete transactions; from brokerage firms which own and operate brokerage stores on its Beike platform where it receives platform service fees, and those under its franchise brands, such as Deyou to which it charges an additional franchise fee; and by providing other value-added services, including transaction closing services, field work assistance, such as on-site verification, agent recruiting and training services. For new home transaction services, the company recognizes revenues from sales commissions charged to real estate developers. For home renovation and furnishing, the company generates revenues by providing renovation and furnishing services to customers. In addition, the company generates revenues from a variety of other housing related services, including financial services and other newly developed businesses, such as its Carefree Rent business. The company owns and operates Lianjia, China’s leading real estate brokerage brand and an integral part of its Beike platform.

Platform

The company launched its Beike platform in 2018. Beike is the leading integrated online and offline platform for housing transactions and services. The company is a pioneer in building the industry infrastructure and standards in China to reinvent how service providers and customers efficiently navigate and complete housing transactions and services, ranging from existing and new home sales, home rentals, to home renovation and furnishing, and other services. The success of Lianjia, China’s leading real estate brokerage brand which the company owns and operates on its platform, paves the way for it to build the industry infrastructure and standard, and support the rapid growth of Beike. The company implemented through Lianjia’s large network of stores a series of industry firsts over the years, including fostering agent collaborations for shared success through its ACN, building a Housing Dictionary, promoting authentic property listings, and leveraging technology to digitalize and standardize processes. These efforts have ultimately resulted in Lianjia’s market leadership, as well as industry-leading service quality and efficiency, making it a trusted household name. More importantly, Lianjia has laid the foundation for the company’s infrastructure with ACN, operational know-hows, and technology systems that seamlessly integrate its online and offline network that has proven to work at a large scale. The company further horizontally extended the core competencies of Lianjia to the Beike platform in 2018 so that it can help hundreds of real estate brokerage brands, including Lianjia, and their affiliated stores and agents to succeed. Meanwhile, the company created an even more scalable infrastructure by a series of efforts, including digitalizing and standardizing three key components, namely, technology, transaction process and service quality to specifically address the challenges facing its industry.

The company’s Beike platform is an open platform for participants in the housing related industry and ecosystem. It enables housing customers, including home buyers, home sellers, landlords and tenants, to enjoy smooth housing transactions and services with high-quality real estate brokerage brands, stores, agents, and home renovation and other service providers. The company’s platform serves as an innovative sales channel for real estate developers and also enables other ecosystem participants, such as home renovation service providers to benefit from its technology and extensive customer and agent base. The foundation of the company’s platform is ACN, through which it streamlines the entire housing transaction process by promoting collaborations among brokerage brands, stores and agents, standardizing authentic property listings and applying a series of cooperation rules. The company also offers various service modules to its ecosystem participants, which, along with ACN, form the scalable infrastructure applicable and beneficial to the whole industry. These modules include SaaS systems, customer front end, community-centric network, technology applications, training and recruiting programs and transaction service centers.

The company’s service offerings to ecosystem participants mainly include: KE Holdings share price history

To Housing Customers: As the leading housing transactions and services platform, the company provides comprehensive services to satisfy the evolving needs of customers. These services primarily belong to three categories: brokerage services relating to existing and new home sales and home rentals; signing-to- closing support that include contract service, secure payment, escrow, among other things; and home renovation and furnishing services. Together with the brokerage brands, stores, agents and other service providers, the company provides housing customers with access to the largest authentic property listing inventory in China and handhold its customers throughout various phases of home ownership lifecycle professionally and efficiently.

To Brokerage Brands, Stores and Agents: The company’s infrastructure is open to all real estate brokerage brands, stores and agents joining its platform. The company provide primarily two categories of services to the brands, stores and agents on its platform: (1) platform services, to enable the brokerage service providers on its platform to conduct automatic role-based commission allocation and use its infrastructure and its different modules in a collaborative manner, including SaaS, technology, training and recruiting, signing-to-closing service, among other things; and (2) branding services, which allow small brokerage stores to join reputable brokerage brands and benefit from better quality control and lead conversion.

To real estate developers: Leveraging its established infrastructure and a broad base of housing customers, its platform is able to act as a powerful sales channel for new home projects, thereby reconstructing the value chain and transforming the way real estate developers discover and interact with home buyers. The company primarily offers comprehensive sales and marketing solutions to real estate developers that include brokerage services, sales planning, reception services, online marketing as well as innovative tools.

To Home Renovation and Other Service Providers: Leveraging its digital transformation capability, the company constantly digitalizes the workflow of home renovation and furnishing and other services, and restructure the process to improve operational efficiency. With all these efforts, the company aims to standardize the process and integrate the refined industry practices and solutions into SaaS in order to better empower home renovation and other service providers.

The company has four main revenue streams, namely existing home transaction services, new home transaction services, home renovation and furnishing, and emerging and other services. For existing home transaction services, the company generates revenues from its own Lianjia brand where the company charges commissions for existing home sales and home rentals, and split of commissions from other brokerage firms that operate brokerage stores on its Beike platform in collaboration with Lianjia agents to complete transactions; from brokerage firms which own and operate brokerage stores on its Beike platform where the company receives platform service fees, and those under its franchise brands, such as Deyou to which it charges an additional franchise fee; and by providing other value-added services including transaction closing services, field work assistance, such as on-site verification, agent recruiting and training services. For new home transaction services, the company recognizes revenues from sales commissions charged to real estate developers. For home renovation and furnishing, the company generates revenues by providing renovation and furnishing services to customers. In addition, the company generates revenues from a variety of other housing related services, including financial services and other newly developed businesses, such as its rental property management services.

As the company become a more trusted platform and the relationship between its agents and housing customers deepens, it is able to extend to other service verticals that are incidental to home ownership and other ecosystem participants. The company endeavors to provide one-stop solutions that address customers’ demands along the home ownership lifecycle, and the company plans to further expand its service offerings and amplify the network effect of its ecosystem.

Agent Cooperation Network (ACN)

At the core of its infrastructure is ACN, an operating system that not only fosters reciprocity and bonding among various service providers, but also enables them to enhance service efficiency and customer experience through collaborative efforts and commission allocation. The company designed its ACN to radically solve the underlying challenges faced by its industry. It serves as the operating system on Beike platform that consists of protocols and practices to specify roles in cooperative housing transactions and prescribe agents’ rights and obligations through commission allocation mechanism. Through ACN, the company standardizes authentic property listings, promote cooperation and information sharing among agents, streamline the whole transaction process, and enables agents to be more specialized in a transaction process and knowledgeable in a particular region. Built on its profound understanding of China’s housing related industry and goodwill accumulated throughout its over 21-year operation of Lianjia, ACN has transformed the housing transactions and services industry in China through the following three reinventions: fostering information and resource sharing among service providers to demolish the walls among isolated information islands, assigning cooperative roles of agents to achieve cross-store and cross-brand collaboration, and creating a professional network for agents, stores, brands and other service providers to get connected and engaged on the platform.

Agent Cooperation and Operational Rules

The company actively promotes agent cooperation on its platform to enhance efficiency of the housing transactions and services industry. The company partitions a complete existing home transaction, including existing home sales and rentals, into different steps and allows multiple agents cross-brand and cross-store to cooperate in one transaction and share commissions based on their roles, through which the agents can become more specialized in their roles.

The company’s ACN encourages connection and collective work in conducting housing transactions by agents from both buy side and sell side on its platform. A home buyer’s initiating agent can choose to cooperate with other buy-side agents who have more relevant transaction expertise or resources, and share commissions with the agent who closes the transaction. Under ACN, commission is allocated automatically based on agents’ various roles in a housing transaction, and is not based on negotiations among agents.

Through role partition and commission allocation, the company makes sure that agents are fairly compensated for work they have done to facilitate a successful transaction, and thereby foster a healthy yet competitive working environment.

Platform Governance Mechanisms

The company implements detailed rules to incentivize agents to follow its ACN and stick to the high standards of professionalism in service delivery, and offer them privileged access if they perform well. The company has implemented platform governance mechanisms to encourage compliance with its ACN such as Beike score which indicates the agent’s performance and service quality to encourage more proactive cooperation and behaviors on its platform.

The company constantly makes efforts to improve business conducts governance. For existing home transaction services, the company set up monitoring mechanism to encourage customers, service providers, platform employees and other participants to supervise and report violations, such as off-platform transactions and customer poaching. The mechanism also empowers the company to effectively identify at-risk stores and rectify problems in time, bringing more sense of security to agents. For new home transaction services, the company jointly promises with new home developers to avoid customer information leakage, customer poaching and other violations. With all of these together, the company aims to enhance the sense of security during agents’ operations.

Authentic Property Listings

The company’s authentic property listing is the foundation of agent cooperation as effective collaboration among agents require valid and reliable listing information. Authentic property listing encourages information transparency and trust from housing customers, increases agents’ operating efficiency, enhances transaction experience, and strengthens its brand image. The company monitor and verify the authenticity of property listings on its platform and timely update or delete unqualified listings through customer callback, physical visits and AI. As of December 31, 2022, the company had approximately 4.58 million authentic property listings for existing home sales.

Modules in Infrastructure

Based on its ACN, the company has been constantly innovating and building various modules to supplement its infrastructure that serves participants on its platform, such as agents, brokerage stores and brands, housing customers, real estate developers and home renovation and other service providers. Examples of modules include SaaS systems for agents and store managers, Beike front end for housing customers, AI technology and applications as the foundation of its platform, virtual reality technology that benefits agents, housing customers and real estate developers, community-centric network that serves housing customers offline, payment solutions tied to electronic wallets that enable secure online and offline transactions, transaction service centers that streamline the transaction process for agents and housing customers, title clearance and escrow services that effectively help with closing, as well as agent development and recruiting services for agents and store managers. Together with ACN, these modules form integral parts of its infrastructure supporting various phases of housing transactions and services offered on its platform.

SaaS Systems

The company provides various SaaS systems to its ecosystem participants. The company empowers agents and brokerage stores through its SaaS systems, which incorporate the cooperation mechanisms that it envisions in ACN and many other tools and functions relating to housing transactions and services. The company implements A+ SaaS system for connected brokerage stores and agents and Link SaaS system for Lianjia personnel. Link SaaS system includes functional support for its internal operation and is otherwise substantially the same with A+ SaaS system. Assisted by the SaaS systems in their day-to-day work, agents and store managers can seamlessly follow its digitalized and standardized housing transaction process. Agents and store managers can access the cloud-based SaaS systems conveniently through desktop application, website, or mobile application. The company also provides SaaS systems for home renovation service providers.

Beike Customer Front End

The company’s Beike customer front end, including ke.com website, Beike apps, Beike Weixin Mini Programs, offers customers relevant housing transactions and services resources and guide them along their journey to make an informed housing transactions and services decision.

The company’s authentic and extensive property listings on its platform form the foundation for high-quality customer services and successful transactions. Housing customers can easily access abundant existing and new home listings and rental listings through its ke.com website, Beike apps, and Beike Weixin Mini Programs. Property listings can be filtered by neighborhood, price, number of rooms, floor area and other attributes.

For existing home listings, customers can view visual presentations including virtual reality or pictures, floor plans, certificate of the brokerage store, comments from agents on the listing and past transaction history in the same neighborhood. Additionally, for new home projects, the company provides an introduction to floor plans offered by the projects, updates relating to the sales, comments from agents and discussion among other housing customers. For rental listings, the company also specifies facilities and furniture provided by the landlord and details of rent, commission and deposit, and display a draft contract for reference. In addition, the company include neighborhood information extracted from its Housing Dictionary, such as transportation, education, healthcare and entertainment resources and other services, so that housing customers can take these into consideration.

The company displays information of agents under property listings and customers may initiate inquiries through instant messaging or phone calls with one click. The company has built individual profiles for agents so that customers can view the agents’ names and titles, employment history, transaction records, awards, and ratings and reviews from past customers. In addition, the company displays Beike score of the agents and percentile on its platform, which generally represents service quality of the agents. Capitalizing on the large agent base on its platform, the company is able to serve housing customers in a timely and efficient manner.

Community-Centric Network

The company’s extensive network allows its platform to amass housing information offline and gain local insights in customer needs and property features. The connections between customers and agents through its online platform allow customers to quickly find stores and agents offline for speedy, efficient and convenient delivery of local service. In addition, the supporting tools available on its platform empowers store managers to build and manage larger teams of agents and increase operational efficiency at store level, solidifying its advantages as an integrated online and offline platform. As each store functions as a working unit, where store managers perform managerial functions, the company is able to maintain operational efficiency as its scale continues to grow.

The company moves forward with its large store strategy, given the wider coverage of community customer leads and stronger financial risk resistance capacity. Working in a larger-sized team also helps increase productivity of agents, where one could build business rapport with the colleagues and get more motivated to perform better.

The company also strives to improve the retention of high-quality service providers, and it has a higher percentage of agents with long track records and high performance results, thus achieving a higher-quality and more efficient service provider system.

Professional Development and Support

The company is fully committed to sharing its accumulated industry know-hows with the agents and home renovation service providers on its platform through offline trainings and online courses.

Signing-to-closing Support

The company offers comprehensive signing-to-closing transaction support to its housing customers. These services include contract service, secure payment, escrow, among other things.

Online and Offline Transaction Service Centers

A housing transaction is typically a stressful exercise that involves many steps and procedural formalities in China, such as submitting purchase agreement to the housing administration, paying taxes to the taxation authority, conducting title transfer and registration of housing ownership with the municipal housing administration, and completing loan application with a bank and/or guarantee services with a guarantee company. These steps often take weeks and involve tens of visits to different locations. To reduce the hassle for both housing customers and agents, the company designed a comprehensive set of standard signing procedures that focus on security, and established Ji Qian/Lucky Sign as the company improve its hardware infrastructure and create the signing system. Lucky Sign helps ensure that transactions comply with its standardized procedures and security requirements, and that the process of transaction service is well-documented and evidence-based. Meanwhile, the company operates the NTS, its proprietary comprehensive online transaction support system available on Beike platform. Through the NTS, housing customers are able to accomplish many necessary transaction steps, such as signing the contracts online and submitting the contracts to the relevant housing administration. The NTS also makes transaction process visible via its apps and websites, which allows customers and agents to monitor various transaction steps and to provide feedbacks and inputs online.

In addition to the comprehensive online transaction support, the company has established offline transaction service centers to facilitate housing transactions, helping housing customers and agents transfer property titles and complete administrative procedures seamlessly and effortlessly. The company has opened transaction service centers in cities it entered and collaborate with banks, guarantee companies, real estate appraisers, and government agencies and station their personnel on-site. The company’s transaction support staff are also available to help with various administrative procedures in the transaction service centers. As a result, housing customers and agents are able to complete most steps necessary to close a transaction in its transaction service centers.

Payment and Escrow Services

In 2014, the company established eHomePay, an online payment platform providing digital payment processing services in housing transactions. As a licensed online payment platform, eHomePay also creates electronic wallets for participants on its platform. These electronic wallets are instrumental in automated accounting, settlement, and disbursement of funds from customers to real estate brokerage stores and agents.

Also functioning as an escrow service, eHomePay solves the trust problem in housing transactions in China where home buyers are concerned with whether the property titles to be received are free of encumbrance after making the payment, and home sellers are unwilling to transfer titles until they receive payment confirmation. The eHomePay platform would operate an escrow account to ensure both the buyer and the seller fulfill their obligations. The eHomePay platform enhances customer experience and ensures payment security, which in turn strengthens its brand image and attracts more customers to its Beike platform. The company’s eHomePay possesses a valid license granted by the People’s Bank of China.

Other Modules

The modules in its infrastructure also include its insights and AI applications, as well as virtual reality and other technologies.

Real Estate Brokerage Brands on Platform

The company is a large and active network of agents, brokerage stores and brokerage brands across China provides a solid foundation for serving a large number of housing customers. As of December 31, 2022, there were over 349,000 active agents and approximately 37,400 community-centric active brokerage stores on its platform, representing 268 real estate brokerage brands. As of December 31, 2022, there were approximately 394,000 agents and approximately 40,500 brokerage stores on out platform. Through the agents, stores and brokerage brands on its platform, the company is able to effectively hone local market expertise, generate leads and build relationships with its housing customers.

Lianjia Brand

The company started to operate real estate brokerage business under Lianjia brand in housing transactions and services industry in 2001 and Lianjia has been recognized as China’s Famous Brand. Through Lianjia, the company provides brokerage services to housing customers, offer marketing and sales services to real estate developers for new home sales and extend brokerage business to home rentals. Leveraging its strong online and offline operational capabilities, the company implemented through Lianjia a series of industry firsts and successfully developed rules, operational know-hows, AI and technology systems that resulted in superior service quality and efficiency. For example, Lianjia was among the first to propose tripartite agreements in housing transactions, including brokerage service providers as a party to provide full transparency and elevated trust. Housing Dictionary was launched on Lianjia in 2008. Lianjia pioneered the migration from offline to online through launching Lianjia.com in 2010 and building its own Link SaaS system ahead of its peers. Lianjia also established the prototype of ACN in 2011, which the company tested and refined before rolling out on Beike.

Lianjia aims to provide highest quality customer services in China and has strived to provide best customer experience. Many ACN rules developed during Lianjia business operations, including authentic property listings, were compiled to guide Lianjia agents. Lianjia also pioneers in adopting protocols on service quality, such as service commitments and customer complaint handbooks, which are standards and rules the company aim to apply throughout the entire Beike platform.

The company screens and recruits high-quality agents on Lianjia and train them to provide efficient and professional services to housing customers. Lianjia has built a strong and comprehensive agent development program that encompasses campus recruiting, regular examinations, offline training and online courses.

As of December 31, 2022, Lianjia had approximately 90,700 active agents and approximately 95,000 agents, and approximately 5,500 active offline brokerage stores and approximately 5,560 brokerage stores across 29 cities in China. As of December 31, 2022, Lianjia had over 24,400 and 21,300 active agents, as well as over 1,300 and approximately 940 active brokerage stores, in Beijing and Shanghai, respectively.

Deyou Brand

The company owns Deyou brand, which is offered for connected brokerage stores that seek for the branding effect and access to solutions offered by Beike platform. Participating brokerage stores can reduce their operating cost, increase business efficiency and productivity, enhance exposure to updated market news and industry trends, gain access to extensive authentic property listing inventory and gain high-quality customer leads on Beike platform. They are able to keep the culture of being a small team while enjoying the full-fledged infrastructure of a tremendous platform and cooperating within its extensive network.

Other Brands

By sharing its deep industry understanding, operational know-hows, and powerful infrastructure, as well as highly efficient online and offline integration, the company helps other real estate brokerage brands to grow and succeed. As of December 31, 2022, the company’s platform connected 267 real estate brokerage brands other than Lianjia, which operated approximately 31,900 active brokerage stores with approximately 259,000 active agents. As of December 31, 2022, approximately 86.2% of the existing home listings on its platform were posted by agents affiliated with connected stores, including stores operated by its franchise brand Deyou.

The company generally enters into cooperation agreements with other brokerage brands. Under these agreements, the company offers the brokerage brands access to the authentic property listing inventory and modules on its platform. The brokerage brands, in return, would commit to following its CAN, as well as other protocols and practices on the platform and subscribe to an agreed-upon fee structure depending on the depth of cooperation. The cooperation agreements also specifically allocate responsibilities between the brokerage brands and the company so that the company are not responsible for the lawsuits and disputes arising from the brokerage brands’ business activities.

Relationship between Lianjia and Beike

Capitalizing on its unparalleled industry know-hows and scalable infrastructure that the company has established during its operation of Lianjia, the company established Beike platform in 2018 to open its solutions to other qualified brokerage brands, stores and agents. Lianjia is the most recognized and influential brand on Beike platform. In Beijing and Shanghai, where Lianjia has established significant market penetration, Lianjia is the only real estate brokerage brand with presence on Beike platform to guarantee high-quality customer services and strengthen market-leading positions in these two markets.

In cities other than Beijing and Shanghai, many other real estate brokerage brands have joined its platform because of Lianjia’s proven track record and market leadership. Lianjia serves as the beacon for other brokerage brands on its platform thanks to its high operational efficiency, top-notch customer services and well-trained agents. Lianjia complies with qualifications and rules that the company consistently implement on Beike platform just like other brokerage brands and is subject to a higher standard in many cases, such as the education level of its agents.

Cooperation with Real Estate Developers

Leveraging its established infrastructure and trust with housing customers, the company is able to act as a powerful sales channel for real estate developers. The company is favored and trusted by real estate developers to facilitate a large number of new home sales in China. The number of new home projects on its platform was over 8,500 as of December 31, 2022. While the company continues to gain trust and mind share in the new home sales market, its receivable turnover remained healthy at 105 days in 2022, as a result of its robust and comprehensive risk assessment measures, although it increased slightly from 97 days in 2021 as a result of the slowdown in collection activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the first half of 2022.

The company has various cooperation methods with real estate developers. For example, the company enters into strategic cooperation with big real estate developers to get favorable terms for facilitating the sales of their new home projects. In particular, it vigorously reach corporate-to-corporate collaborations with selected developers, including state-owned developers, to improve the quality of its sales projects and certainty of commission collection. The company also has local business development teams that directly cooperate with individual new home projects under various cooperation modes.

The company focuses on risk control and business conduct governance, as well as efficiency and profitability improvement for its new home transaction services. For new home sales facilitated by us, the real estate developers that meet its certain requirements pays the company the commission after the home buyer signs the sales and purchase agreement with the real estate developer and makes the down payment. The company also speeds up commission collection and promote the Commission in Advance model. By encouraging developers to pay the company in advance so as agents to get their commission earlier, it brings more sense of security to agents and resulted in faster sell-through for real estate developers, achieving an all-win situation.

Home Renovation and Furnishing Services

Leveraging close connection between its agents and housing customers, the company started to provide home renovation, re-modeling, and home furnishing services to its customers. The company officially launched its home renovation and furnishing services, Beiwoo, in April 2020. In July 2021, the company entered into an acquisition agreement with Shengdu, a full-service home renovation service provider in China. The acquisition was closed on April 20, 2022. The company’s home renovation and furnishing services aims to offer a one-stop solution to give housing customers access to a comprehensive range of home renovation and furnishing services, ranging from interior design, renovation, re-modeling, furnishing, supplies, to after-sales maintenance and repair.

The company integrates the organizational structures and operation procedures of its housing transaction services and home renovation and furnishing services. Through training and internships, the company assists with agents’ learning of professional home renovation and furnishing knowledge to improve the traffic referrals and customer conversion from its housing transaction services to home renovation and furnishing services.

The company also promotes its furniture and home furnishing sales business by revamping the business process, implementing a scientific management model to control key metrics, and launching an online management system, to offer a variety of products and services, including customized furniture, soft furnishings, and electrical appliances.

The company actively explores its customers’ needs for home renovation through its online platform, brokerage stores, and experience centers. Recognizing the lack of standardized service procedure and poor service performance in the industry, the company is committed to offering smooth home renovation and furnishing services through standardized and visualized practices. The company use VR to virtually show its customers what their homes will look like in the future through RealSee VR technology, which features a realistic experience. During the actual implementation of the renovation plans, the company has established a quality-based order dispatching system and incentive mechanism for home renovation service providers, and also established detailed standards and practices for each step of the core service process, which also helps shorten the delivery cycle. The company has rolled out the upgraded the Home SaaS 2.0 system, which realized the online operation of the business and integrated designs throughout BIM (Building Information Modeling) process, and also supported the robust management of delivery cycle, quality and materials.

The company cooperates with qualified and strictly selected contractors. The company purchases high-quality supplies, distribute and deliver the supplies, or become an efficient sales channel for the high-quality supplies, and manage construction teams to execute the work. In addition, housing customers are able to observe the working site in a real-time manner and track the renovation progress online through the app, which improves the transparency of the renovation and furnishing services. The company also implements service commitments to its customers, and builds up customer service system that assures quick responses.

Home SaaS for Renovation and Furnishing

The company iterated Home SaaS for renovation and furnishing, an all-in-one SaaS that empowers home renovation professionals to manage the entire lifecycle of their projects in one place. The company’s system enables them to capture sales leads, manage customer and supplier relationship, perform managing and supporting functions, design the remodeling plan, sign contracts, schedule payments, implement the construction plan and manage the supply chain.

Home Renovation and Furnishing Service Provider Empowerment

Aiming to build the industry standards and enhance the overall service quality, its training courses are tailored to meet the specific needs of service providers across the entire home renovation value chain, including leads consultants, account managers, interior designers, surveyors, engineers, general contractors and construction workers, among others.

The empowerment of home renovation and furnishing service providers mainly involves three aspects—growth, training and culture. The company continues to improve the recruitment process of project managers and workers, and the scale of experienced project managers and workers keeps expanding. At the same time, the company has designed multi-level trainings that focus on process standards, rules and regulations, and employment benefits for them. By combining online and offline methods, the company works to improve the professionalism of service providers and customer satisfaction. The trainings are divided into three stages: orientation, which mainly involves integrated trainings and mentoring; on-job training, which includes monthly theme training and skills improvement training; and leadership training, which prepare workers for promotion to project managers. In terms of culture building, the company encourages service providers to make recommendations to improve current standards and management strategies. The company also holdsservice provider conferences to encourage and award outstanding service providers.

Carefree Rent

The company’s Carefree Rent focuses on decentralized rental property management, aiming to solve the housing problems of city new comers and young people. It integrates the scattered housing sources in the market, and transforms them into quality and reliable long-term rental housing supplies. In addition, Carefree Rent provides housekeeping services, maintenance and other post-rental services, making the house owners truly care-free and the tenants to feel secure.

Insights and AI Applications

The company’s platform generates a significant amount of insights from historical property information, interactions on its platform, and transactions that it facilitates. Moreover, given its scale, the company has a holistic view of the market, including supply, demand and pricing trends. These valuable insights help the company provides customized products and services, match agents with listings, housing customers, and facilitate transactions.

Housing Dictionary

The company launched Housing Dictionary in 2008 and has been building it for over a decade. It encompasses a wide range of housing related information from the neighborhoods, the communities, the buildings, to the floors and rooms. As of December 31, 2022, its Housing Dictionary covered approximately 267 million properties. Agents on its platform can browse information relating to their own cities in Housing Dictionary through its SaaS systems. Agents can supply new property information or raise amendment through mobile app, Weixin Mini Programs and other entrances. Through Housing Dictionary, the company verifies the authenticity of property listings, supplement real estate information on its platform and offer property valuation services based on property information and past transaction history.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Applications

The company has provided some of its AI applications to other ecosystem participants. Examples of the AI applications on its platform include:

Intelligent Search and Prediction: The company uses advanced machine learning algorithms such as relevance ranking and click-through-rate prediction to produce high-quality search results. The company use deep learning algorithms to intelligently predict the transaction probability of a property listing based on static features and time series features. The company also provides valuation services using its proprietary algorithm based on Housing Dictionary and extensive transaction history.

Smart Lead Allocation: When online consultation occurs, the company utilizes the characteristics of the houses, the historical characteristics of the service provider and the customer preferences to predict the settlement rate for different service providers serving the same customer, and assign the best service provider to the customer to provide consultation, so as to better complete subsequent offline services.

Property Promotion System: The company uses an intelligent matching system, which is based on deep learning algorithms, to find the more suitable buyers’ agents for the listed properties. This helps its sellers’ agents to find potential customers and achieve accurately matched housing transactions.

Beike’s Pick. The company has deployed Beike’s Pick that recommends high-quality property listings to housing customers based on a rating system that considers factors, such as property features, property viewing history, and property showing records. Based on housing customers’ profiles, the company is able to predict their interests on Beike’s Pick properties with high accuracy and push the listings to their agents before pushing the listings to corresponding agents, resulting in higher conversion rate. In general, property listings on Beike’s Pick enjoy more exposure on its platform, resulting in faster transaction decision, shorter transaction period and higher conversion rate.

Textual and Speech Assistant: The company has developed Smart Chat using natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to provide intelligent customer services to housing customers through instant messaging system. The company has also developed and continue to upgrade its AI Assistant (Xiaobei) to provide agents with real-time interactive feedback and training, and offers smart management functions to store owners, thereby increasing transaction efficiency and service quality. The company also replicated the technological capabilities into its home renovation and furnishing services. Through the Xiaobei trainings, it simulates the home renovation and furnishing showroom, and the customer consultation scenario in the form of man-machine dialogue, so that service providers will be more familiar with home renovation and furnishing knowledge.

Futurehome Renovation System: The company has developed Futurehome, an AI-empowered system that features automatic generation of home renovation and furnishing plans. It can also generate interactive floor plans and 3-dimensional within minutes. Once the floor plan has been created, its housing customers may walk through and experience the renovation design through rendered high-definition visual presentations. Futurehome makes it easy for renovation service providers to create and analyze multiple plans for one project with different layouts and costs, thereby helping housing customers to make better decision.

Marketing and Branding

The company promotes its platform and enhance brand awareness through a variety of online and offline branding and business development activities. The company cooperates with websites and mobile apps, particularly popular search engines and social media platforms, for online and mobile marketing. The company also conducts offline marketing primarily in the form of title sponsorship, promotional events, posters, and television commercials. For example, the company were the title sponsor of the 2022 Beike Beijing Marathon held on November 6, 2022, celebrating the spirit of sports with runners. In 2021, the company sponsored China Central Television (CCTV)’s broadcast of the Olympic Games, with advertisements shown on CCTV during the broadcast of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 and the Beijing Winter Olympics in 2022. In addition, the company sponsored the China Women’s National Volleyball Team from January 2020 to January 2022.

The company’s high-quality real estate brokerage services lead to strong word-of-mouth referrals, which drive customer awareness of its brands. As of December 31, 2022, the company had 6,152 business development and supporting staff engaged in expanding the company’s business geographically.

Intellectual Property

As of December 31, 2022, the company had 1,345 issued patents and 1,069 pending patent applications. The company also owned 7,387 registered trademarks, 716 pending trademark applications, copyrights to 712 software programs developed by its relating to various aspects of its operations, and 157 registered domain names, including ke.com and lianjia.com, as of December 31, 2022.

Research and Development

The company spent RMB2,546 million (US$369 million) in research and development in the year ended December 31, 2022.

History

KE Holdings Inc. was founded in 2001. The company was incorporated in the Cayman Islands in 2018 under the Cayman Islands Companies Law as an exempted company with limited liability.

Country
Founded:
2001
IPO Date:
08/13/2020
ISIN Number:
I_US4824971042

Contact Details

Address:
Oriental Electronic Technology Building, No. 2 Chuangye Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100086, China
Phone Number
86 10 5810 4689

Key Executives

CEO:
Peng, Yongdong
CFO
Xu, Tao
COO:
Data Unavailable