Real estate platform Jiwu wants to copy Alibaba's success

Shenzhen-based Jiwu.com announced its new strategy on Tuesday to copy Alibaba's success into real estate sector by connecting property sale agents with homebuyers.

The company, established in 2011, branded itself as a "Tmall-like platform" that helps China's new home sale agents to reach homebuyers and offer online-to-offline services. Tmall is Alibaba Group Holding's flagship site that enabled premier brands to reach customers through their virtual stores.

"We'll not use our own employees to sell homes. Instead, we will offer technologies to help our agents to sell homes because they know much better about specific property projects," Pan Guodong, co-founder and CEO of Jiwu.com, told audience in a Steve Jobs-style presentation. The company last year disbanded its direct sale team to become a pure "platform".

Pan is a former manager with Alibaba Group. Another co-founder was from Tencent Holding Ltd.

He said with the new model, homebuyers could use their smartphones to inquire dealers in real-time. "Under traditional model we found one third of phone calls to dealers went unanswered. Dealers also responded to customers' online inquiries slowly. On the other hand, agent companies spent huge money on hiring dealers to reach potential customers," he said.

To facilitate customers to visit home projects, Jiwu even signed a deal with a Didi Chuxing, a car-hailing company, to provide free trip for customers.

Pan sees the property e-commerce as a huge untapped sector, as only 8 percent of China's 10 million units of annual home transactions currently are done through internet platform.

The company received a "A+" fundraising with unspecified capital in December, before it underwent a 100 million yuan series A financing in May.