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 infrastructure and standards to reinvent how service providers and customers efficiently navigate and complete housing transactions and services in China, ranging from existing and new home sales, home rentals, to home renovation and furnishing, and other services. In 2024, the company facilitated over 4.9 million housing transactions on...
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 infrastructure and standards to reinvent how service providers and customers efficiently navigate and complete housing transactions and services in China, ranging from existing and new home sales, home rentals, to home renovation and furnishing, and other services. In 2024, the company facilitated over 4.9 million housing transactions on its platform. The company owns and operates Lianjia, China’s leading real estate brokerage brand in respect of service quality and an integral part of the company’s 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 infrastructure and standards to reinvent how service providers and customers efficiently navigate and complete housing transactions and services in China. 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 the company’s 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 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-how, and technology systems that seamlessly integrate its online and offline network that has proven to work at a large scale. The company 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.
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 the company’s 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:
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 four categories: brokerage services relating to existing home sales and home rentals, and marketing services relating to new home sales; signing-to-closing support that includes contract service, secure payment, escrow, among other things; home renovation and furnishing services; and home rental 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 handholds the company’s customers throughout various phases of home ownership lifecycle and other residential services 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 provides primarily two categories of services to the brands, stores, and agents on its platform: 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 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 the company’s 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 channel marketing, sales planning, reception services, online marketing, as well as innovative tools.
To home renovation, home rental, and other service providers: Leveraging the company’s digital transformation capability and refined management, the company redefines and restructures the roles of home renovation, home rental, and other service providers to enhance operational efficiency.
The company has five main revenue streams, namely existing home transaction services, new home transaction services, home renovation and furnishing, home rental services, and emerging and other services. For existing home transaction services, the company generates revenues from the company’s own Lianjia brand, where it charges commissions for existing home sales and home rentals, and splits of commissions from other brokerage firms that operate brokerage stores on the company’s 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. For home rental services, the company generates revenues by providing rental property management and operation services, as well as various other rental-related services. In addition, the company generates revenues from a variety of other housing-related services, including financial services and other newly developed businesses.
As the company becomes a more trusted platform and the relationship between the company’s 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 residential lifecycle, and plans to further expand its service offerings and amplify the network effect of its ecosystem.
Agent Cooperation Network (ACN)
At the core of the company’s 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 ACN to radically solve the underlying challenges faced by its industry. ACN serves as the operating system on the Beike platform that consists of protocols and practices to specify roles in cooperative housing transactions and prescribe agents’ rights and obligations through the commission allocation mechanism. Through ACN, the company standardizes authentic property listings, promotes efficient cooperation and orderly competition among agents, streamlines 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 the company’s over 23-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 the 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. In 2024, approximately 75% of the existing home sales completed on the Beike platform involve cross-store collaborations following its ACN.
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 ensures that agents are fairly compensated for work they have done to facilitate a successful transaction, and thereby fosters a healthy yet competitive working environment.
A brokerage store has the right to manage existing home listings in the vicinity of the store and act as sell-side agents for those listings. For buy-side agents, if their customers have intentions to buy homes in other regions, they can obtain a portion of the commission on completed transactions by recommending their housing customers to agents in the desired regions.
Platform Governance Mechanisms
The company implements detailed rules to incentivize agents to follow ACN protocols and stick to the high standards of professionalism in service delivery, and offers them privileged access if they perform well. The company has implemented platform governance mechanisms to encourage compliance with ACN protocols, 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 conduct governance. It creates an integrated online and offline governance mechanism that is self-inspected by store owners and supplemented by platform supervision. This mechanism empowers the company to effectively identify violations, such as off-platform transactions and customer poaching, and rectify problems in time, creating a more secure environment for real estate agents. Meanwhile, the company further strengthens the operations of regional co-governance councils, enabling store owners to better provide input on platform rule iterations, fostering a more collaborative environment among stores. For new home transaction services, the company promotes joint promises with new home developers to avoid customer information leakage, customer poaching, and other violations.
Authentic Property Listings
Authentic property listing encourages information transparency and trust from housing customers, increases agents’ operating efficiency, enhances transaction experience, and strengthens the company’s brand image. The company monitors and verifies the authenticity of property listings on its platform and timely updates or deletes unqualified listings through customer callbacks, physical visits, and AI. As of December 31, 2024, the company had approximately 6.0 million authentic property listings for existing home sales.
Modules in the Company’s Infrastructure
Based on the company’s 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, home renovation, home rental, and other service providers. Examples of modules include SaaS systems for agents and store managers, the Beike front end for housing customers, AI technology and applications as the foundation of the company’s 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 the company’s 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 the company 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. The Link SaaS system includes functional support for the company’s internal operation and is otherwise substantially the same as the A+ SaaS system. Assisted by the SaaS systems in their day-to-day work, agents and store managers can seamlessly follow the company’s digitalized and standardized housing transaction process. Agents and store managers can access the cloud-based SaaS systems conveniently through desktop applications, websites, or mobile applications. 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, and Beike Weixin Mini Programs, offers customers relevant housing transactions and services resources and guides them along their journey to make informed housing transactions and services decisions.
Housing customers can easily access abundant existing and new home listings and rental listings through the company’s 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, certificates of the brokerage store, comments from agents on the listing, and past transaction history in the same neighborhood. For new home projects, the company provides basic project information, VR tours of model units, property value analysis, neighborhood insights, price comparisons with surrounding areas, authentic user reviews, and real-time project updates. For rental listings, the company also provides visual presentations, including virtual reality or pictures and specifies facilities and furniture provided by the landlord and details of rent, commission, and deposit. Particularly, customers can view introductions to rental services, service fees, available move-in dates, and other information for the company’s Carefree Rent business.
The company includes 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 also provides consumers with short videos introducing existing home listings, neighborhoods, and new home projects and offers live streaming for users to elaborate on those topics, aligning with their consumption preferences for such content. To help customers assess the timing of buying and selling, the company launched market updates on its customer front end in certain cities. Meanwhile, to assist users in finding their ideal residential communities, the company has introduced the Beike Housing Rankings. In addition, the company provides services such as property valuation, market information, online listings, and asset management for homeowners, strengthening the connection and interactions between the platform and homeowners.
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 the Beike score of the agents and percentiles on the company’s platform, which generally represents the 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.
For home renovation and furnishing services, the company provides a variety of tools and services on the company’s customer front end to help customers quickly calculate renovation quotations, find design examples, designers, and renovation packages that they desire, assisting customers in making decisions. The company’s home design product Sheniu also supports one-click generation of various style renderings, helping customers realize their home ideas and improve communication efficiency between customers and service providers.
Community-Centric Network
Property transactions are generally high in value and involve high risk, which requires substantial information analysis and research prior to consummation. Unlike a click-and-buy product, every residential property is unique in various aspects, such as location, property features, conditions, and age, resulting in different values. Convenient accessibility and abundant local insights and knowledge on the community often carry heavy weights when housing customers select real estate brokerage agents in housing transactions. Furthermore, as China is a populous country, residential communities with high population density are prevalent in urban areas. Focusing on community outreach and engagement, the community-centric network serves as convenient access points for local walk-in housing customers and as tangible offline touchpoints of the company’s platform.
The company’s extensive network allows its platform to amass housing information offline and gain local insights into 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 empower store managers to build and manage larger teams of agents and increase operational efficiency at the store level, solidifying the company’s 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’s community-centric stores are also becoming an important foundation as it develops its one-stop residential services, including home renovation and furnishing and home rental services. The company empowers real estate brokerage agents to become ‘residential’ consultants, transforming them from agents only facilitating housing transactions to experts with consumer insights to facilitate a wide range of residential services.
In recent years, an increasing number of stores on the company’s platform start to offer complimentary convenience services, such as printing, charging, and internet browsing, to community residents. Through these high-frequency interactions, the company’s agents are able to build connections with housing customers, which not only generates effective housing transaction leads but also positions the company well for other housing-related services.
Professional Development and Support
The company attaches great importance to agent training and adopts a comprehensive learning approach that combines online courses, offline training, hands-on tasks, and passing assessments. This multifaceted approach enhances the competency of agents and motivates them to continue to improve and deliver professional services to customers.
Store owners and managers are essential to the success of brokerage stores. By establishing Huaqiao Academy and providing various digitalized tools, the company assists them through enhancing their business operations and continually improving the system for their professional career development.
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 agreements 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 applications 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 it improves its hardware infrastructure and creates 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 the 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 the transaction process visible via the company’s apps and websites, which allows customers and agents to monitor various transaction steps and to provide feedback 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 collaborates with banks, guarantee companies, real estate appraisers, and government agencies, stationing 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.
The company also integrated its home renovation and furnishing services into its offline transaction service centers. At selected centers, the company has dedicated sales representatives and designers available, allowing customers with needs for home renovation after a property transaction to engage directly with them for prompt assistance. Customers can also easily schedule home measurement appointments, ensuring a convenient and efficient experience with its one-stop residential services.
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 operates 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 the company’s brand image and attracts more customers to the company’s Beike platform. The company’s eHomePay possesses a valid license granted by the People’s Bank of China.
Other Modules
The modules in the company’s infrastructure also include its insights and AI applications, as well as virtual reality and other technologies.
Real Estate Brokerage Brands on Platform
As of December 31, 2024, there were over 445,000 active agents and over 49,000 community-centric active brokerage stores on the company’s platform, representing 267 real estate brokerage brands. As of December 31, 2024, there were approximately 500,000 agents and over 51,000 brokerage stores on its 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 a real estate brokerage business under the ‘Lianjia’ brand in the 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, offers marketing services to real estate developers for new home sales, and extends brokerage business to home rentals. Leveraging the company’s 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. The 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.
Taking service quality as its priority, Lianjia has been improving its customer services and established a comprehensive set of rules and standards accumulated over the past 23 years. 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.
The company screens and recruits high-quality agents on Lianjia and trains 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, 2024, Lianjia had approximately 114,000 active agents and approximately 5,600 active offline brokerage stores. As of December 31, 2024, Lianjia had over 28,000 and 31,000 active agents, as well as approximately 1,400 and 1,200 active brokerage stores in Beijing and Shanghai, respectively.
Relationship between Lianjia and Beike
Capitalizing on the company’s unparalleled industry know-hows and scalable infrastructure that it has established during its operation of Lianjia, the company established the Beike platform in 2018 to open its solutions to other qualified brokerage brands, stores, and agents. Today, Lianjia is the most recognized and influential brand on the Beike platform.
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 industry-leading service quality. 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 implements on the 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.
Deyou Brand
The company owns the Deyou brand, which is offered for connected brokerage stores that seek the branding effect and access to solutions offered by the Beike platform. Participating brokerage stores can reduce their operating costs, 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 the 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 the company’s 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, 2024, the company’s platform connected 266 real estate brokerage brands other than Lianjia, which operated approximately 44,000 active brokerage stores with approximately 331,000 active agents. As of December 31, 2024, approximately 87% of the existing home listings on the company’s platform were posted by agents affiliated with connected stores, including stores operated by its franchise brand Deyou. In 2024, approximately 66% of the GTV of existing and new home transactions on its platform was generated by connected real estate brokerage stores and the sales channels the company specifically procured for new home transactions.
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 the company’s ACN, 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 is not responsible for the lawsuits and disputes arising from the brokerage brands’ business activities.
Cooperation with Real Estate Developers
Leveraging the company’s 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 company has various cooperation methods with real estate developers. For example, the company enters into strategic cooperation with big real estate developers to facilitate the sales of their new home projects. In particular, the company vigorously reaches corporate-to-corporate collaborations with selected developers, including state-owned developers, to improve the quality of the company’s sales projects and certainty of commission collection. Leveraging the company’s accumulated knowledge and customer insights, the company refines the strategies to market and sell new home projects, accelerating sell-through and enhancing its services for developers. 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 the company, the real estate developers that meet its certain requirements pay 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 promotes the ‘Commission in Advance’ model. By encouraging developers to pay the company in advance so that agents can get their commission earlier, it brings more sense of security to agents and results in faster sell-through for real estate developers, achieving an all-win situation.
Home Renovation and Furnishing Services
According to customer needs and preferences, the company provides professional services, including home design, construction, customized furniture and soft furnishings delivery, as well as post-sales support, to create an ideal and comfortable living space for its customers. The process for the company’s home renovation and furnishing services mainly includes customer acquisition, lead conversion, construction delivery, and after-sales maintenance.
The company acquires customers through various channels, including offline referrals, online advertising, marketing campaigns, and word-of-mouth recommendations from existing clients. The lead conversion process mainly consists of initial communications to understand customer needs, arranging on-site measurements, creating flat design proposals, conducting showroom visits, and finalizing quotations and contract signing. Throughout this process, the company’s designers maintain close communication with customers and conduct multiple showroom visits to ensure the proposed designs and renovation outcomes meet customer expectations.
Throughout the company’s entire home renovation and furnishing services, the company provides assurance to consumers in terms of quality, construction period, and safety. Simultaneously, the company’s strict customer complaint management ensures high-quality resolution.
Infrastructure Development
Home renovation and furnishing services entail a long business process chain, involving diverse materials, products, and the coordination of personnel in multiple roles. Infrastructure development plays a crucial role in this process, encompassing digital system construction and supply chain development.
Digital System Construction
The company establishes and continuously iterates a set of online digital systems that features product data on a unified standard, covering the entire business process, and incorporates a personnel management and evaluation system. The online digital systems include the core digital platform Home SaaS, as well as auxiliary systems, such as digital personnel, Sheniu, and smart construction sites.
Home SaaS
Home SaaS serves as the core digital platform for the company’s home renovation and furnishing services, comprising several subsystems, including the customer sales system, Building Information Modeling, or BIM, system, central control system, construction delivery system, and supply chain system. It also includes a Weixin mini-program that provides customers with full-process digitalized services.
Since 2019, the Home SaaS system has undergone continuous iterations and is currently operational nationwide, providing online capabilities for more service providers. In 2024, the company has iterated and upgraded the system to Home SaaS 2.5. Home SaaS 2.5 is specifically focused on enhancing the quality and efficiency of the company’s home renovation and furnishing services. By integrating BIM with the designer Share Service Center, or SSC, it promotes standardized operational management in design planning, client quotations, and the drafting of construction drawings. Through lightweight BIM and AI proposals, it provides designers with multiple solutions to improve efficiencies. Additionally, by unifying scheduling for main materials, providing visibility of material scheduling, and coordinating multi-role process collaboration, it promotes the integration of material delivery.
Supply Chain Development
The construction delivery and customized furniture delivery processes in home renovation and furnishing services involve a variety of materials and products, thereby establishing a robust supply chain system that is essential to ensure transportation timeliness. For customized furniture, the company has established and continuously iterated a comprehensive self-operated transport and logistics system and set up self-operated warehouses nationwide to boost storage and delivery efficiency. The company also participates in the quality inspection of some customized furniture to ensure the high quality of the products.
Home Rental Services
The company’s home rental services primarily encompass decentralized and centralized rental property management and operation services, as well as various rental-related services, including traffic monetization businesses and online rental management services. As of the end of 2024, the total number of home units under management in its home rental services exceeded 430,000.
Among these services, Carefree Rent, the company’s decentralized rental property management and operation service, represents the largest segment. As of the end of 2024, the total number of home units under Carefree Rent exceeded 420,000.
Carefree Rent transforms scattered rental home listings into high-quality, reliable, institutionalized long-term rental properties by obtaining landlord authorization and providing professional rental services to tenants, ensuring peace of mind for landlords and a secure, worry-free living experience for tenants. In terms of specific business model, the company acquires rental property mandates from landlords through agents for the company’s housing transaction services and other channels, makes basic preparation, and lists the properties for rent. Leveraging Beike’s extensive customer traffic, the company facilitates fast and efficient matching between properties and tenants. For landlords, the company enables efficient property leasing, reduces vacancy periods, and provides stable returns, while minimizing the time and effort required for pre- and post-rental matters. For tenants, the company offers a comprehensive range of rental services, including dedicated rental managers, professional maintenance, cleaning services, broadband services, and smart door locks, ensuring a safe and worry-free rental experience.
‘Service quality’ and ‘asset management efficiency’ are the two pillars of the operation of Carefree Rent.
In terms of service quality enhancement, the company has deconstructed the service chain into standardized actions. By assigning dedicated personnel to specific roles, the company has improved both service capacity and efficiency. For example, offline rental stewards are responsible for pre-move-in property inspections, ensuring standardized home delivery. Meanwhile, online rental service managers provide 24/7 support, promptly responding to tenants’ urgent issues or service requests. To enhance service assurance, the company has introduced multiple service upgrades and guarantee mechanisms. For instance, for high-risk properties, such as those prone to water leakage, the company has established a rapid response and professional repair mechanism.
In terms of operational efficiency enhancement, the company continues to optimize and upgrade the Carefree Rent product model, strengthening its resilience against rental price fluctuations. Through deep synergy with its housing transaction services, the company has improved efficiency on both property acquisition and leasing, enabling sustainable business growth. Particularly in leasing, the company has strengthened the development and operation of stable leasing channels to enhance rental certainty. At the same time, the company has refined the management of second-time leasing, increasing tenant renewal rates and pre-leasing rates to reduce vacancy risks.
Additionally, the company leverages AI technology to empower operations. By applying intelligent algorithms in areas, such as property acquisition pricing, inventory management, and rental leasing, the company optimizes traffic allocation, pricing, and marketing strategies. These efforts have improved asset turnover efficiency in pilot cities.
Beihaojia
Beihaojia is the company’s new business initiative focusing on upgrading residential development services. The company envisions building a data-driven platform for residential development services through Beihaojia.
In terms of business model, Beihaojia primarily provides C2M (Customer to Manufacturer) product solutions for real estate developers and other business partners, offering flexible and diverse funding solutions, as well as efficient marketing services that integrate both online and offline channels. Beihaojia’s C2M product solutions leverage Beike’s vast data accumulation and Beike’s capability to connect potential customers. Through big data analysis and AI algorithms, Beihaojia deeply analyzes and uncovers customer needs, forecasting the types of products and price expectations for target customers. Such information serves as an important reference for product positioning and design for real estate projects, enabling the company to provide partners with tailored product positioning and design solutions, ultimately helping to create new home products that better align with market demand.
In 2024, the company has been actively establishing its presence in key cities in the country, continuously refining and innovating its operational models in the process. Notably, the company’s Xi’an project became the first case in which Beihaojia generated service revenue through its product solution services, demonstrating strong market endorsement for its business model.
During the initial phase of business development to validate and refine the company’s C2M capabilities, the company also acquired two land plots for property development for the Beihaojia business in 2024. In Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China, the company acquired a residential land parcel with an area of approximately 15,777 square meters. In Shanghai, China, the company acquired a residential land parcel with an area of approximately 15,304 square meters.
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 the company’s scale, it has a holistic view of the market, including supply, demand, and pricing trends. These valuable insights help the company provide customized products and services, match agents with listings, housing customers, and facilitate transactions.
The Company’s Housing Dictionary
The company launched the 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, 2024, the company’s Housing Dictionary covered approximately 289 million properties. Agents on the company’s platform can browse information relating to their own cities in the Housing Dictionary through its SaaS systems. Agents can supply new property information or raise amendments through the mobile app, Weixin Mini Programs, and other entrances. Through the Housing Dictionary, the company verifies the authenticity of property listings, supplements real estate information on its platform, and offers property valuation services based on property information and past transaction history.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Applications
The company places great emphasis on the potential of AI to enhance consumer experiences and improve service efficiency, continuously investing in AI development. By integrating proprietary residential-related data with advanced foundational AI models, the company has built Beike’s domain-specific language model, ChatHome, and its domain-specific image model, DreamHome. Based on this foundation, the company has developed the comprehensive Bella AI development and application platform, which supports a range of AI-driven applications. Examples of AI applications on the company’s platform include:
For consumers:
AI Rental Property Management Assistant ‘AI Abei’: Piloted within the company’s rental brokerage services and home rental services, this is an intelligent assistant designed to support homeowners. It accurately understands homeowners’ needs and swiftly provides solutions. Through conversational interactions, it efficiently assists homeowners with various aspects of the rental process, such as listing rental properties, adjusting prices, and uploading property images.
AI Design Tool ‘Sheniu’: This tool, developed for the company’s home renovation business, is powered by its proprietary residential large language model, DreamHome. It can generate high-quality renovation renderings in multiple styles using real photos, floor plans, or reference images. This not only significantly enhances designers’ efficiency but also provides customers with an intuitive and convenient way to visualize their future homes.
For service providers:
AI Property Listing Maintenance Assistant: This tool operates through Weixin groups, intelligently supplying agents with professional materials for daily interactions with homeowners, such as pricing strategies, market promotion data, and industry policy insights. It strengthens agent-homeowner relationships and enhances property management efficiency.
AI Property Selection Advisor: This tool helps agents better identify and understand customer preferences, offering personalized property recommendations and solutions. It can help improve customer acquisition capabilities and service efficiency of agents.
DreamHome AI: This tool assists service providers, including designers, in rapidly generating AI-powered interior design renderings. It enables customers to explore and express their ideal living spaces effortlessly while providing service providers with a powerful visualization tool to facilitate communication, reducing communication costs and enhancing the service experience and efficiency.
Smart Construction Site System: Leveraging AI technology, this system enables real-time monitoring, process management, and quality inspection across renovation sites. It establishes a fully digital and closed-loop management system covering the entire home renovation delivery process. By addressing longstanding challenges in traditional site management, it can help enhance both construction quality and operational efficiency, while providing customers with a more transparent and reassuring service experience.
For internal efficiency enhancement:
AI Business Management Assistant ‘Sun Xiaosheng’: Designed for home renovation business managers, this tool simulates core managerial skills and workflows to assist frontline managers with data analysis and business tracking. It can boost managerial efficiency and support better decision-making.
AI Office Assistant ‘Naohai’: This tool is designed to help with daily administrative and repetitive tasks, unlocking employee potential so that they can focus more on core business and innovation efforts, thereby improving the overall operational efficiency of the organization.
AI Coding Assistant ‘CodeLink’: This tool supports intelligent code completion, generation, and debugging. It helps accelerate product iteration cycles and drive continuous upgrades to its overall technological capabilities.
Research and Development
The company spent RMB2,283 million (US$313 million) in research and development in the year ended December 31, 2024.
Marketing and Branding
In 2024, the company enhanced brand affinity through online and offline brand promotion and marketing initiatives, continuously reinforcing its image of evolution towards a one-stop residential services platform. The company successfully title sponsored the Beijing Marathon for three consecutive years (2022-2024) and also sponsored marathons in multiple cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Nanjing. Additionally, the company’s nationwide community running events have become an extension of the spirit of sportsmanship. Lianjia has continued to strengthen its commitment to quality service, conveying its brand values of ‘peace of mind, reliability, and responsibility.’ The company’s home renovation brands, Shengdu and Beiwoo, have undergone brand refreshes. Shengdu launched the ‘Designer Craftsmanship Star Program,’ highlighting the professional and confident image of service providers, while Beiwoo completed a comprehensive upgrade of its ‘Ten-Heart Genuine Commitment’ service pledge. Furthermore, the company collaborated with mobile applications to conduct online marketing campaigns via social media platforms and the company’s own digital platforms. Offline, the company carried out marketing efforts through outdoor advertising, community events, and other diverse promotional activities.
As the company gains trust from customers through facilitating housing transactions and services, customers often refer it to their families, friends, and social acquaintances, or return to the company’s platform when they have other housing-related needs, be it home rentals, renovation, or other services.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company had 1,908 issued patents and 1,159 pending patent applications. The company also owned 8,292 registered trademarks, 728 pending trademark applications, copyrights to 788 software programs developed by it relating to various aspects of the company’s operations, and 161 registered domain names, including ke.com and lianjia.com, as of December 31, 2024.
Seasonality
The company’s business is subject to seasonal fluctuations, normally with relatively weaker performance in the first quarter (year ended December 31, 2024), consistent with the housing-related industry in general. Subject to any other macroeconomic or regulatory conditions, the first quarter of each calendar year generally contributes the smallest portion of its annual revenue, primarily due to a reduced number of housing transactions and rental activities during the Chinese New Year holiday period, and reduced home renovation and furnishing works in winter.
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.
