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Fan Zhiwei, a 57-year-old small business owner in Liaoning, China, spends at least two hours on short-video and livestreaming app Kuaishou every day. Guided by the app’s algorithm, he usually watches videos about cooking, current affairs, and life as a retiree. Early in 2023, the app served him a video from “Xiao Zhang,” who appeared to be a real estate livestreamer giving viewers virtual tours of properties in the tropical Chinese town of Xishuangbanna. The streamer steadily moved his camera through apartments, pausing to answer questions from viewers in his comment section about natural light or parking facilities.
Fan was hooked. He had heard of Xishuangbanna as a niche tourist destination, often marketed as “Thailand within China.” He found himself watching more streams from Xishuangbanna, showing off not just homes there, but the beauty of the landscape surrounding the city. Fan peppered Zhang’s comments with questions for weeks before submitting his number in a contact portal inside Kuaishou for a personal consultation.
Creator “Banna Real Estate Brother Qian” livestreams on Douyin from a construction site for a luxury apartment complex.
Douyin/Banna Real Estate Brother Qian
Within two hours, he received a call and a WeChat friend request from Xiao Zhang, who turned out not to be a single person but a team of real estate agents. On WeChat, the agents learned Fan’s budget and expectations, and started recommending available apartments, even offering to pick him up at the airport if he decided to visit in person. By the end of the year, Fan took his first trip to Xishuangbanna — and paid in full for an apartment in the city. “This is the perfect retirement home that I didn’t know I needed,” Fan told Rest of World.
China’s property market has plummeted since the pandemic, reversing the unbridled growth of housing prices in the past two decades. Country Garden, one of the nation’s biggest real estate developers, reported that in the second half of 2023, pre-sales were down 74% from a year earlier. The collapse pushed real estate companies into a deep debt crisis, with China’s biggest real estate developer, Evergrande, being liquidated in January.
Livestreaming real estate agencies, however, have helped make Xishuangbanna an exception. Located in Yunnan province in the far south of China, near the border with Myanmar and Laos, Xishuangbanna has seen a surge in property sales recently, largely driven by people from outside the city. From January to October 2023, sales totaled 12.583 billion yuan ($1.72 billion), a 69.4% increase from the previous year. Eighty percent of the sales come from outside of Yunnan — a figure that many attribute to the influence of livestreaming real estate agencies. In 2023, Kuaishou livestreams sold 50 billion yuan ($6.84 billion) worth of homes, according to Chinese media outlet Jiemian.
“Xishuangbanna is the pioneer of livestream real estate,” Li Jianxiong, a real estate agent on short-video app Douyin, told Rest of World. According to Xishuangbanna’s local government, 77.86% of new home buyers in the town are not from the region. One notable example is Rainforest Time, a massive real estate project with over 8,000 single-family homes. Completed during the pandemic in 2020, the development is nearly sold out, with most customers having discovered it after watching livestreams, real estate agent Allen Li told Rest of World.
With its beautiful tropical landscape and distinct local culture, Xishuangbanna is perfect for showing off on livestreams, and popular among those looking to buy a vacation home, multiple real estate agents told Rest of World. Li Jianxiong said that 80% of his clients come from Douyin; some are even willing to buy homes without visiting them in person. “Compared to home buyers who already live in the city, out-of-town buyers tend to rely more on digital channels like livestreaming to do research about their destination,” said Zheng Hailong, an agent in Xishuangbanna who works for Anjuke, one of China’s biggest real estate marketplaces.
“Every bit of traffic counts.”
Zheng said he and most of his colleagues started showing properties online during 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic prevented them from doing so in person. “Our sales were dwindling as people were quarantined at home, but people craved entertainment and novelty,” said Zheng. “We sought to provide that by livestreaming about properties, or we simply wouldn’t have any clients.”
“I started livestreaming because of a lack of clients,” said Eddie Zhang, a real estate agent in Xishuangbanna. He said he had struggled to find customers in 2021, and started posting about properties on Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu. “Every bit of traffic counts.”
Creator “A Hong Realty Talk” livestreams on Douyin about living and investment tips around Xishuangbanna.
Douyin/A Hong Realty Talk
Short-video apps like Douyin and Kuaishou have increasingly replaced traditional real estate listings websites as the dominant way to find clients, Zheng said. They have established real estate service arms to better compete with traditional platforms like 58.com and Beike. In 2023, Douyin launched Xingfuli, a real estate-focused service aiming to expand to 50 cities across China and sign on more than 4,000 livestream real estate agents by the end of 2024. Kuaishou also went through an internal overhaul: It established a real-estate service center called Ideal Homes to boost livestream property sales on the app by signing and verifying agents. Both platforms now provide real estate sellers with certified “professional accounts” on a consultation portal, and analytics tools to see their sales performance.
Experts are skeptical about whether these new sales channels can revive China’s sluggish real estate market as a whole. Ritu Agarwal, a professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University with expertise in Chinese urban development and economics, told Rest of World Xishuangbanna is an exception, since its natural beauty makes it ideally suited to livestreaming. “Livestreaming provided a perfect gateway for out-of-town buyers to the locale,” she said. “However, this model does not apply to most cities in China, where the real estate market remains sluggish.”
It may not have caught on across China yet, but buyers in Xishuangbanna are happy with their new way of shopping for houses. Geng Bowen, a professional investor and recent home buyer in Xishuangbanna, purchased a house after watching livestreams on Douyin for two months. She told Rest of World she enjoyed the efficiency of “shopping online” for houses, as it freed up a lot of time for her. “Compared to offline agents, these online livestreaming agents are available almost 24/7 and have a bigger database of information,” said Geng.
“Sometimes I still miss the personal touch you get from meeting an agent in real life,” she said. “It is usually easier to tell if an agent is sincere or trustworthy that way.”
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This article was originally published by a restofworld.org . Read the Original article here. .