Works of Tiger Sniffing Mobile Information Group
Author | Liu Jingrong, editor | Huang Qingchun
Title map | Visual China
Recently, the eggshell was named by the court again, and it became an “old lai” for 10,000 yuan.
The Tianyan check platform revealed that on April 20, the People ’s Court of Xihu District, Hangzhou issued a message of the person who was dishonestly executed. The filing date is March 27, and the amount involved is 12080 yuan.
The property reporting system means that the person subject to execution must not report all or part of the travel financial payment obligations, and must report the true report one year before the date of notification as required by the court To prove that he has no or temporarily no ability to perform. Otherwise, it should bear the corresponding legal consequences.
At the same time, Zhang Xue, the company’s legal representative, was also issued a consumption restriction order by the Xihu District People’s Court of Hangzhou. The case number is (2020) Zhe 0106 Executive No. 1120. In addition, its wholly-owned shareholder Qingwutong Co., Ltd. held all the shares of the company frozen by the court.
Although Eggshell Apartments responded to this, saying: “This is a misunderstanding, the ruling has not come into effect, and an application for withdrawal has been filed earlier.” But the court ruling is already a fact.
Some lawyers said that after the labor department makes a ruling, it needs to be enforced by the court in accordance with the legal process. Before it is formally executed, the party subject to execution also has the right to execute an objection to the enforcement and withdraw the application.
If the eggshell becomes “old lai” because of 10,000 yuan, it is really worthless. But the case also exposed external concerns about the cash flow behind the rapid expansion of the eggshell.
Transformation under expansion
3 months after the eggshell went public, the long-term apartment has not been reversed due to the transitional expansionThe capital flow is tight.
In March, Eggshell released its first performance report after listing. Its report shows that eggshells have been in a net loss for three consecutive years due to continuous operating costs higher than operating income. And since the disclosure of eggshell data, the net operating cash flow gap has been widening.
In the whole of 2019, the eggshell net loss amount was 3.437 billion yuan, and the net profit margin was -48.2%; the adjusted EBITDA (profit before tax, interest, depreciation and amortization) was -1.922 billion yuan, and the value in 2018 was -1.164 billion yuan, compared with -115 million yuan in 2017.
Actually, the fundamental reason behind the tight cash flow in the eggshell is: crazy expansion.
According to the fourth quarter of eggshell data, the number of eggshell apartments in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen is about 224,000, an increase of 46.6% year-on-year. The trend of eggshell expansion is still in the first- and second-tier cities with high prices.
As of December 31, 2019, the number of apartments operated by Eggshell Apartments reached 438,300, an increase of 85.4% year-on-year. This number is 179 times higher than the 2434 at the end of 2015.
In addition, the number of apartments in other cities has also increased significantly by 156.1%, close to 215,000. The current eggshell business footprint has spread across 13 cities in China.
Even though expansion will continue to widen the funding gap, the eggshell has faced a dilemma under the increasingly fierce peer competition.
Compared with the eggshell, the free expansion is even crazier. In 2019, Ziroom has more than 1 million listings, far exceeding other players. In addition, the source of 285,000 suites immediately followed the eggshell.
In fact, jumping out of the company and looking at the industry, it is the long-term imbalances in the supply and demand of the rental market that have caused the various platforms to expand.
In the context of deepening urbanization, population migration is accelerating, but due to high house prices, renting has become the best choice for the younger generation, and the second landlord ’s penetration rate in the entire rental market is less than 10%.
In this case, only after controlling the market can we continue to increase rents through monopoly situations or increase other revenue methods to obtain higher income. Therefore, for the head platform, the number of listings is the only way for brands to seize the market.
At present, the industry pattern is not determined, and the most important thing to grab a house is cash flow. If you want cash flow, you can’t escape the fate of “rent loan”.
The business of the second landlord is essentially to earn a middle difference by buying at a low price and selling at a high price. Among them, the turnover of funds plays an extremely important role in itGreat importance. Expansion of housing requires a large amount of one-time use of funds, and rent is indeed a process that requires long-term recovery. In order to get these funds in one go, the second landlords cooperated with third-party financial institutions to start the rental loan model.
A rent loan is a tenant who signs a loan contract with a financial institution that cooperates with a long-term rental apartment company while signing a lease with the company. The financial institution pays the tenant’s full-year rent in advance to the long-term rental apartment, and the tenant pays the financial institution’s monthly rental loan to the financial institution, and the loan interest is paid by the long-term rental apartment. After the apartment side obtains funds in advance, it can obtain liquid cash flow to acquire new houses and continue to expand.
However, the use of rent loans is like walking a tightrope. Once the apartment platform does not return the money to the third-party financial platform or the original landlord in time, the tenant will face the situation of being displaced and carrying loans, causing social instability. .
In the past few years, rights protection incidents caused by the breaking of the platform ’s capital chain have occurred frequently, and regulatory authorities have been increasingly punishing the chaos in the rental market.
On February 18, the Political and Law Commission of the Shenzhen Municipal Committee issued a notice to the financial regulatory authorities and the Shenzhen Banking and Insurance Regulatory Bureau on the “Notice on Relevant Investigation Work” Notice “) The notice indicates that there are rental loans involving eggshell risks involving social stability, and further investigation is required.
This is not the first time eggshells have been named. As early as August 17, 2018, the Beijing Municipal Housing and Urban-Rural Development Committee has focused on major platforms such as Zirui, Xiangyu, and eggshells and made clear requirements: Housing leasing enterprises shall not use capital to compete for housing in a vicious competition; they may not use higher-than-market rents or coercive rents to seize housing; they may not induce landlords to prematurely terminate rental contracts by raising rents, etc.
But the industry is blindfolded, and any platform that suddenly stops expanding may well mean being out. Even if the regulationWith the tightening of the platform policies of the three-party financial institutions, and almost cutting off the capital flow of the second landlords, in order to obtain expansion support, the eggshells have not stopped, but instead opened the road to bloody listing.
However, what the eggshell never expected was that the epidemic happened again when the cash flow was tight. As a result, the rent-free incident of eggshell “one fish for two” broke out during the epidemic.
At the beginning of the epidemic, major real estate-related companies are actively responding to the central government ’s call to frequently release “goodwill” to tenants with certain preferential rent policies. But the eggshell used this to stage a “one fish two eats” drama.
On the one hand, the eggshell discussed with the 200,000 landlords behind them, trying to persuade them to rent-free and benefit for tenants for a month, but the landlords ’rents in December were not yet in place, and rent-free in January. Accept such terms. On the other hand, the eggshell did not provide rent-free for tenants. Many tenants of eggshell apartments told the interface news that they did not receive any news about rent-free.
So, the eggshell was scolded by the tenant for a hot search. In the face of media inquiries, Eggshell said that it was possible to temporarily exempt tenants during the closure of Wuhan for one month, and the rent would be returned in March.
Image Note: Ju complaints have been made on eggshells to force the owners to rent-free, refuse to pay deposit deposits, the number of complaints reached 1046.
Furthermore, during the epidemic period, the increase in the vacancy rate of the eggshell caused a decrease in rental income, and it mobilized the employees ’brains to save money. Since January 19, eggshell employees have burst out of eggshells, not only delaying the payment of wages, but also dismissing employees in disguise.
In the end, the eggshell made itself smart, and was forced to waive the rent of some tenants, not to mention the fact that the landlord and the tenant complained, which damaged the brand’s reputation.
Eggshell stock prices have also fallen rapidly since February, and the opening price of $ 6.9 per share as of April 23 has been listed from the time of listing (January ) ‘s $ 13.5 has fallen by almost half.
Long-term apartment “pit”
Pan Shiyi, chairman of SOHO, once expressed his pessimism about the long-term apartment model, because its return rate is only 1%. A long-term rental apartment, after superimposing the rent, decoration, management, and operating costs, is basically equal to the price of renting out, and even has a slight loss.
Long-term rental apartments, as an industry with scale traps, to run through this model, the marginal cost must be reduced after reaching the scale effect, and coupled with proper management, they can start to make money.
But in fact, the scale and benefits of rapid expansion are extremely difficult to balance.
Eggshell has been trying to solve the unification of scale and efficiency with the concept of technology, that is, the hope of reducing the cost and improving the operating efficiency through the increase of unit housing, in order to break the current operating dilemma and continuously narrow Loss rate. The question is, can this be achieved in the short term?
According to another group of eggshell financial report data, eggshell apartments invested 194 million yuan in technology and product development costs in 2019, an increase of 74.6% over the same period in 2018. These funds are mainly used to expand the technical team to develop technical systems and improve products and services.
One is BI big data business intelligence system.It can standardize and modularize every process link from housing collection, housing measurement to housing delivery; and the real and transparent information, price and standard service system can enable users to make quick judgments, and effectively promote the network of the housing rental market 化 程。 The process.
The other is the “Luban” system that will be launched in 2019. The system is based on the big data accumulated during the house design and decoration process, combined with laser imaging and machine vision technology, which can quickly identify the construction type and match the optimal house renovation plan. This system can simplify the decision-making process and manual dependence, enough to reduce the time and cost of house design.
These are the actual products of the eggshell “Science and Technology Story”. Eggshell summarized the story of this technology as a closed-loop system of “service-scale-technology-ecology” and became its own moat.
In addition, in 2017, the average decoration cost of an eggshell apartment was 12,646 yuan per room. In the first nine months of 2019, it has dropped to an average of 10,404 yuan per room.
The problem is that the expansion rate of eggshell listings is still very rapid. Reducing costs through procurement alone is not enough to optimize overall efficiency. In addition, the development of new cities makes it difficult for these houses to immediately produce local scale effects for cost reduction.
One of the data in the eggshell prospectus is that when eggshells are quoting to the landlord, the accuracy of the predicted price of the house rented and the actual rental price is 95%. In theory, estimating the price more accurately saves a certain amount of time and cost, but this is not critical for revenue.
As for the tenant’s online use system, this is the standard for long-term rental apartments.
“This technology story is true and false,” said Xiang Huwen, the founder of a long-term rental apartment. While the industry has shifted from early brutal growth to refined operations, this story is sexy and caters to everyone’s imagination of Internet companies. However, these so-called technological empowerments cannot fundamentally change the model.
In the face of the undetermined trillion market of renting houses, Eggshell still has a long way to go to tell the story of long-term rental apartments.