原创首发 | 金角财经（ID: F-Jinjiao)
Author | Yingbao
Shell, a "real estate middleman", actually took the land to build a house in person.
On September 20, Beihaojia (Chengdu) Real Estate Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of Beike, won the H12 plot of the third phase of Chengdu Jinjiang District Financial City.
The land covers an area of 15,800 square meters, with a number of schools, nursing homes and parks planned nearby, and complete ecological construction and infrastructure, attracting 14 real estate companies such as Greentown, C&D, China Merchants, Yuexiu and Joy City to participate in the auction. This trick between the bigwigs ended with the "layman" shell throwing 1.076 billion yuan - a price with a premium rate of 42.2%.
Different from the previous joint land acquisition, this is the first time that Beike has successfully acquired land independently, and the whole process will be operated by the real estate project independently.
Beike's area of expertise is real estate brokerage, and it went public in 2020. However, real estate development, which has never been deeply cultivated, suddenly took out 1 billion yuan to play cross-border, which is really stubborn in the eyes of the outside world. After all, the current real estate environment is not a good time to buy the bottom, and there are so many real estate companies in the country, and only Shell is still in the "spring".
Is the shell rich and nowhere to spend, or is it trying to figure something?
Crazy enclosure
Judging from the business trajectory, Beike is serious about real estate development.
Since the beginning of this year, Shell has been sold in Beijing, Guangzhou, Xi'an, and Chengdu. In addition to the Chengdu plot, there is also the Xi'an plot.
On July 30, Beike spent 134 million yuan to bid for two residential land with a contract of 14.5 acres in the core area of Xi'an North Second Ring Road, which was also regarded by the outside world as "Beike's first successful land acquisition in the land auction market".
In the plots of land in Beijing and Guangzhou, although the shells were not won, they also showed their sincerity at high prices. On June 25, when it bid for a plot of land south of Hedong Road in Liwan, Guangzhou, the price was 675 million yuan, which was very close to the final transaction price of about 700 million yuan, and on March 15, when it competed with 37 real estate companies for a plot of land in Shunyi Airport in Beijing, it had no choice but to meet Beijing Construction Engineering, which bid 1.16 billion yuan and raised the premium rate to 15%.
The land that Shell is interested in has one characteristic: it is located in a superior location in a large city, and the facilities are well planned. For example, Beijing Shunyi Airport has a ready-made international school and commercial complex, only 800 meters away from the large complex Xiangyun Town, and only 1.3 kilometers away from the subway station.
According to Chenguang Real Estate Research, Beike has selected a total of 10 cities that give priority to land acquisition, namely Beijing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Xi'an, Nanjing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hefei.
This shows that Beike is no longer satisfied with earning trading commissions, and wants to penetrate upstream and "eat up" in the entire industrial chain, and "eat" high-spending groups in large cities, rather than ordinary residential users in sinking cities or suburbs. Beike also admitted this in an interview: "Beihaojia (a data-driven residential development service platform) is in the early stage of exploration, focusing on cooperation opportunities in China's major first- and second-tier cities. ”
For the past year, Shell has been preparing for its ambitions.
In July 2023, Beike announced the launch of the "One Body and Three Wings" strategy. The "three wings" refer to home improvement, housing leasing, and Bei Haojia, announcing the debut of the real estate development business, and Xu Wangang, vice chairman of Beike, personally served as the CEO of Bei Haojia.
According to the report of "Real Estate Finance", Beike has recruited a group of professional managers from well-known developers such as Jinmao, Vanke, Gemdale, Longfor, and Vanke at a salary three times higher than that of their peers, who have served as the general manager of the engineering department, the head of the customer research center, and the partner of urban research in the former company. At the same time, Beike has registered Beihaojia branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Xi'an and other places. Some netizens once ridiculed: "Shells have become the second industry reservoir, and the first one is Didi." ”
However, real estate development is a field involving multi-industry synergy and a lengthy industrial chain. Does the shell have the power to build a house? It has always been a gathering point of controversy.
According to Beike's response, it will adopt the "1+2 model" to develop real estate, that is, the cooperation model between Beike, the owner and the construction agent. In short, Beike only provides plans, funds, marketing services, demand data, etc. in the development process, and the real operator is the agent construction company, such as the project in Xi'an, which has decided to introduce Greentown management to build on behalf of the company.
As for Chengdu's independent operation of land, Xu Wangang, vice chairman of Beike Group and CEO of Beihaojia, said that the independent operation of a project does not mean that Beihaojia wants to become a real estate developer, and the main purpose is to better verify the landing ability of C2M product solutions and enhance the trust of partners in the "1+2 business model".
The so-called C2M products, that is, from consumers to manufacturers, through the support of Beike's huge transaction database, have a good idea of the customer base, house type, and price, and then customize the residential products.
It turns out that "anyone with money can engage in real estate" is true.
Net profit of 20 million per day
"Shells are rich" has been mentioned repeatedly in the last year.
Beike's financial report shows that in 2023, its total transaction volume will be 3.1 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 20.4%; total revenue was 77.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 28.2%; Net profit was RMB5.89 billion, a year-on-year increase of 524.45%.
In 2024, the momentum will continue unabated. In the first half of the year, Beike's total transaction volume was 1.5 trillion yuan, net income was 39.7 billion yuan, and net profit was 2.33 billion yuan, of which the net profit in the second quarter reached 1.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 46.24%.
According to the net profit of 1.9 billion yuan, Shell has to make a net profit of 21.11 million yuan every day.
Tens of billions of revenues and double-digit net profits are in particular contrast in the context of the sharp narrowing of the performance of real estate companies.
Taking Vanke, the leader of real estate companies, as an example, the net profit attributable to the parent company in the second quarter of this year was -9.491 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 212.65%. Looking at the entire industry, according to CRIC data, the operating income of 50 typical listed houses such as Vanke and Poly in the first half of the year was 1,457.2 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 13%; gross profit was 161.5 billion yuan, down 34% year-on-year; The net profit loss was 37.3 billion yuan, and the net profit loss attributable to the parent increased to 47.9 billion yuan.
Shell bucked the trend, partly due to "scale pushing up revenues". By the end of 2023, the number of Beike stores was 44,000, an increase of 8.1% over the previous year; The number of brokers was 428,000, an increase of 8.5% over the previous year. In short, the more employees do the work, the more revenue is created.
But the most important thing is that Beike has found the second and third growth curves, that is, the "two wings" of home improvement and housing rental. According to the financial report, in the first half of 2024, the net income of Beike's housing leasing business increased by 176.7% year-on-year to 5.8 billion yuan, and the total transaction volume of the home improvement and home furnishing business increased by 24% year-on-year to 7.6 billion yuan, accounting for 16.23% of revenue.
The explosion of the second and third growth curves boosted the overall performance. You may not believe it, but the first half of 2024 report shows that the standing liquidity on Shell's account is close to 60 billion yuan - which gives Shell the courage to play cross-border.
So, why do you want to cross into the real estate development industry with such a large risk of loss? The reason is also very simple, no matter how bad a new house sells, it will make more money than selling a second-hand house.
Taking the first half of 2024 as an example, the transaction volume of Beike's second-hand housing business will be 1.02 trillion yuan, and the transaction volume of new housing business will be 387.1 billion yuan - only 37.8% of the transaction volume of the second-hand housing business, less than 40%, but the net income of the new housing business will reach 12.8 billion yuan, which is the same as the net income of the second-hand housing business of 13 billion yuan.
Commissions for new home business are lucrative.
Although Beike did not disclose the specific commission ratio, it mentioned in the second-quarter financial report that the net income generated by the developer's prepaid commission "fast commission" project accounted for a high of 49% of the net income of the new housing business. In addition, Beike is actively building partnerships with more high-quality developers, such as state-owned enterprises, which have increased their commission income to 55% from 47% in the same period in 2023.
It can only be said that in the downward stage of real estate, if you want to sell the house, you can't do without shells.
Is it buying the bottom?
"We had two requirements for ourselves at that time, the first was not to join in the fun, and the second was that we did not do what the developers did."
In the book "Detailed Discussion: Zuo Hui", this passage of Zuo Hui, the founder of Shell, is recorded, and the explanation may be found in another passage of his words:
"The channel is also the developer's night pot, the market is not easy to take out and use, and the market is good to put it back. It's just that we are willing to be used as a night pot, but from the perspective of risk control, it is more certain to do a good second-hand. ”
But three years after Zuo Hui's death, Beike started working as a developer. This is considered by the outside world to be "seeing the hope of buying the bottom", the reason is that Beike is willing to go down, proving that the market is gradually bottoming out, the risk of loss is smaller or even controlled, combined with some positive remarks, such as "Caixin Weekly" reported that "the adjustment of housing prices in some cities in China has approached the global average, that is, the decline in China's housing prices is a normal phenomenon in the process of economic development", more and more people are beginning to believe the statement of buying the bottom.
Searching for "shell copying" on Douyin, netizens' statements are like "Chunjiang plumbing duck prophet", "Shell has big data, and its control of the market is stronger than any company, it has copied the bottom, what are we waiting for" and so on. On Xiaohongshu, there are 700+ notes related to "shell copying".
In fact, the shell has nothing to do with the "bottom-buying signal" at all.
The two urban plots currently obtained by Beike, the two plots in Xi'an are indeed low prices - the converted transaction floor prices are 7,200 yuan/㎡ and 5,530 yuan/㎡, while the prices of second-hand houses in the surrounding areas are mostly between 1-13,000 yuan/㎡, with ample profit space. However, the land in Chengdu was only obtained at a premium of 42.2%, and its floor price of 23,700 yuan/㎡ also broke the local floor price record.
The relevant person in charge of Beike once mentioned in an interview that some developers do not understand the market demand, resulting in building a house like opening a blind box, "what kind of products do you plan to make when you get the land, and what percentage of the opening is expected to be removed, and the opening has exceeded imagination", and Beike has 420,000 brokers, and contacts a lot of customers, real estate, land resources and developers every year, and they are confident that they can develop projects that match customer needs.
In the same logic, Beike is based on experience and big data, and sees the potential for property prices to rebound in individual cities, so it decides to sell.
The property markets in Xi'an and Chengdu are indeed relatively healthy.
From the sharp adjustment in 2021 until April 2024, the price of new homes in Xi'an has risen month-on-month for 14 consecutive months, although there was a slight decline of 0.1% in May, but it rose back in June. Among the only four cities in the country where new home prices rose month-on-month in June this year, Xi'an ranked second in terms of month-on-month increase in new home prices.
CRIC Sichuan data shows that in the first half of 2024, Chengdu's residential transaction area will be 6.1 million square meters, ranking first among key cities, surpassing Hangzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Suzhou, Shenzhen and other cities.
The act of shouting that you want to buy the bottom with Shell is like buying two bottles of wine with room for value, and everyone says that all the wines under this brand have investment value, which is too much to look up to Shell.
Moreover, real estate development is prone to several years, whether Shell's "Internet house building concept" can be implemented, whether the money is enough to squander to high-rise buildings, and what the future real estate market will be, everything is still uncertain.
Resources:
said that the Fortune Cat "Thinking Carefully is Extremely Terrifying! Real estate is not good, but the head of the intermediary is making crazy money"
Chenguang Real Estate Research "Cautious Shells, Finally Get the Land"