By Herman Lai, posted May 31, 2011 at 12:09 PM, 376 views,

Sina Offers Real Estate To Purchase Online in China!

Yesterday, China’s largest online vertical real estate service platform “Sina Leju” formally opened and launched a campaign. This is the first online platform in mainland China that allows consumers to purchase and look up apartments online, and the first day of sale so far wasn’t too bad. They sold out 180 sets of real estate out of 601 units within two minutes. However, the shareholders seem aren’t very feel happy with the result.

The shareholders of Sina Leju indicated:

“There are only less than 200 sets of real estates were sold through the internet, this cannot compare with offline sale, thus now is still exploratory stage. Will the sale of real estate transform to online purchase is still questionable, we still need more time for experimentation for sure.”

Sina Leju is an online service platform that operated by the largest website “Sina”. The Chinese media prefer to call it “游站 (Yau Zhan)”, not sure which is the name that I should call it.

Anyway, here is a short brief from Sina Leju:

Based on the enormous brand advantages of the largest portal website among Chinese communities—Sina, Sina House has become the largest online vertical real estate media and information service platform operated by Beijing Yishengleju Information Service Co.,Ltd. With the innovative concept of “Real Estate Society ”, Sina House presents both massive traffic and massive data, combining professional online media and professional real estate, and commits to creating comprehensive information service platform and more professional vertical online real estate media.

We have roughly checked out the website, there are three main selections and they are “preview the apartment”, “choose the apartment” and “purchase the apartment”. Basically, everything on the site is pretty straight forward. But now, you can sit on your sofa with your computers and search your ideal apartments on the internet. Sounds cool? Therefore, there will be less traffic within the real estate agency. Save times!

Moreover, Leju also has experience center which placed a whole lot of tablets on desk for consumers to search their dream home. Buyers can view the concept shots of the apartment while listen to sale personnel introducing. A buyer in the center said:

“This method of purchasing real estate is my first time that I have met ever, put my ideal set into the cart, then purchase it when the sale began.”

Usually, purchasing online implies things come cheaper. But this is totally a different story when applied on purchasing an apartment. China regulated consistency in the price for real estate, which means the price of a same real estate should not be different among online and offline. The only way to get discount is to “group-buying”. Overall, internet certainly is an inevitable cultural trend that would soon dominate our life, and the way to sell real estate is tendency toward the use of technology, especially the experience of 3D technology is rapidly improving.

Source: China.com