The entrepreneurial story of the post-80s "apartment" professional secondary landlords

Roy had this sentence printed on the back of his business card. He is a "post-80s", rural background, Peking University graduate, and typical "north drift" youth. In a busy city, where most people like him have experienced renting, it is not easy to find a suitable place to live.

Luo started as a "secondary landlord" right out of school, and now his venture is related to that -- providing quality, long-term rental apartments for urban white-collar workers. His brand is called Apartment See.

Professional secondary landlord

I have been a "primary landlord" for more than seven years. In July 2007, I graduated from the Russian Department of Peking University. Without looking for a job, I wanted to start my own business. However, I had no direction at all. I wanted to find a place to live first, so I rented a bungalow near Tsinghua University.

There are three small houses in the courtyard, a total of more than 20 square meters, I rented one of the 4 square meters, and the other two have not been rented, I think it is a pity, it is difficult to find a house near Tsinghua University. I rented the other two, with a bunk bed, and then posted on the Shuimu Tsinghua forum to rent it out. The tenant paid the deposit, I took the deposit to buy a second-hand washing machine and air conditioning with, so began to be a second landlord.

These two small houses can charge 1,900 yuan a month for rent, which solved my livelihood problem. In August, I found a two-story basement at the south gate of Tsinghua University, with more than a dozen small rooms, which I rented to graduate students. Basements like these around schools are in short supply. At the same time, I also rent a three-room bungalow at the east gate of Peking University, which can put more than 20 beds.

These two projects have a profit of 6,000 to 7,000 yuan a month. I feel that the business of the secondary landlord is interesting, and the cash flow is very good.

In the winter of 2007, I turned to my teachers, classmates, and friends, borrowed more than 110,000 yuan, and rented 58 large bungalows outside the west gate of Tsinghua, which were all built by local farmers. The previous landlords did not know how to operate, and many houses were empty and could not be rented. They rented it to me for 400 yuan a room, and I invested 200 yuan in each room to buy the bed, bookcase, sheets, garbage cans, curtains, and other necessities, all second-hand. At that time, my cost control was particularly good. The garbage can cost five yuan and the curtain cost ten yuan, which were all very cheap inputs. Simple DECORATE GOOD ROOM CAN RENT TO 650, I GO TO SEVERAL SCHOOL FORUM POST, A MONTH TIME ALL RENTED OUT.

The project has been running for five years, with a net profit of more than 10,000 yuan a month. Rent a single also have a small couple, I don't need the upper and lower beds, which are two meters of a double bed. I found that as long as the interior environment is a little better than other groups of rentals, business will be very good.

Another lesson is that rooms need to be as centralized and manageable as possible. Group rent I have also done, in April 2008 I in Zhichun Road plate down a dozen group rent, do more than a year, the results did not earn money. Nearly 20 houses are distributed in several communities, one room lives more than a dozen people, and even a three-bedroom lives more than 30 people, management is particularly troublesome, not only has safety problems, but also the management of water and electricity maintenance and other chores, rent also want to run around.

I ended up selling them to a high school friend.

Fail in catering

The 2008 Beijing Olympics raised the expectations of the rental market a lot, and I found that I couldn't get the listings, and all the houses were sky-high. I carefully calculated the accounts. Firstly, I could not get a good house with the money in my hand. Secondly, I judged that the rental market was in a high-risk operation stage at this time, and I might lose money. Therefore, in 2008, except for the project near Tsinghua University, I did not expand the rental business and switched to catering.

Yu Hongyin, the partner I found, was also a high school classmate. He graduated from Jilin University in 2008. Seeing my success as a principal landlord in Beijing, he came here to work with me. We have a period every day ran across the street to find a house and happened to see a roadside restaurant particularly popular, called "Duchenne hot and sour powder", very simple snacks. When we both tasted it and it was good, we said why don't we do it too? Renting a house and making snacks seem like the same business to us.

We will go to the owner of this hot and sour powder to talk about joining. It turns out that catering is not so easy to do, and we think a lot of things are simple. At that time, we opened two shops, one in a private school and another in a technical secondary school.

I came out of school and always wanted to do business around campus. The way we estimate passenger flow is to count the dorms, how many dorms you know about how many people, where there are a lot of people there must be a business.

But we are wrong in this judgment method. Technical secondary schools are not able to recruit students, and many dormitory buildings are empty. In addition, Beijing's technical secondary schools and private colleges and universities are mostly local students, a weekend to go home. If a shop earns a small profit of five or six thousand yuan a month, it is of little significance to do this.

Mr. Yu and I are both from Sichuan, and we have been eating Chongqing noodles since childhood. Although we didn't make any money making hot and sour noodles, it made me think about using similar standardized methods to make noodles. In 2010, we founded the small noodle brand "Face said Mountain City".

You and I found nine college classmates, together with more than 400,000 yuan, have opened three stores, there are more than a dozen franchised stores. By March 2012, we had closed all three stores and the venture had failed again.

The reason for the failure lies in the wrong positioning. We want to do a theme restaurant with noodles as the core, 8 yuan a bowl of noodles, and some other supporting products. But in fact, Chongqing small noodles is difficult to form a series of products, ordinary people come in to eat noodles and go away, and he can not come to eat small noodles every day.

8 yuan is the price of low-end snacks. You and I are both from rural areas, and we think it is affordable and delicious. However, our restaurant is better decorated than roadside stalls, and such a price is impossible to do in Beijing.

If you like Kang Shi Fu private house beef noodles, a bowl of noodles around 28 yuan to have a chance.

These are the lessons of entrepreneurship. In March 2012, Mr. Yu and I closed the company and sold the brand for 50,000 yuan to the boss who made hot and sour powder. During that time, I locked myself in my room every night drinking coke, chain-smoking, full of problems, that I can't solve.

Service style apartment

You have to do what you know, and I decided to do it again. In 2012, an old hotel with 123 rooms in Laiguangying on the North Fifth Ring Road was converted into rental housing. The owner had finished the basic renovation, and I jumped at the chance to put in $500,000 and contract the building.

I invested more than two million yuan to renovate the interior environment and then used a month to rent out more than 100 rooms. This kind of old house has many problems, such as water leakage and electricity leakage, wall cracking and so on. The cost of operation and maintenance in the later period is very high, and the tenants' living experience is not good. I found out it was a bottomless pit, so I resold it.

In the winter of 2012, I began to seriously reflect and think clearly about several issues. First, in first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai, the demand of the rental market is far from being satisfied, and there must be a lot of room for improvement. Second, the products offered by this industry are still rough, and there is no user experience to speak of in renting a house in Beijing. Third, the market order is chaotic, and no matter whether the intermediary or the secondary landlord, has a bad reputation, rental disputes are also a lot. Taking all these points into consideration, I think there is still a big market gap between rental houses and express hotels -- long-term rental apartments with certain hardware quality, standardized management, and relatively affordable prices for white-collar workers.

In 2013, Manager Yu and I spent several months doing market research. While we were doing this, other businesses were targeting this market and developing products first. Homelink's "Free House" has opened its first store, we ran to see, this is what we want to do! The shop has 165 rooms, which are small and well decorated. The lobby on the first floor has a large public area.

The project was well received by the market, and Homelink accelerated the pace of opening stores.

I felt a sense of urgency and confidence that the rental market was large enough to accommodate many different types of companies. The products I want to do gradually have the outline: small apartment, standardized decoration, chain format, mainstream customers should be more than a year of the lease. I have been a landlord for many years, and I know that stability is the most important thing in renting a house. Only stability can spread the cost.

For Homelink products, I have made some functional optimization, such as adding closet storage space and a balcony, because you need to air clothes to live at home, which is the difference between an apartment and a hotel.

The interior decoration of the first shop of Free House was small and fresh artistic style, but they later found that the real artistic youth were not the mainstream customers, because the price of Homelink is still high.

The second and third stores of Free House began to consciously use dark color interior design, emphasizing the business sense, but the rental operators know that there are many beautiful but impractical designs in that room, squeezing the storage space. And I want to give young people a sense of home, living at home must be practical, comfortable, and as much as possible use of space.

In October 2013, our "Apartment See" project was officially launched. You and I, together with another partner, each took out 1 million yuan to start doing this. We looked at many properties and finally settled on two floors of a commercial and residential building with 77 rooms in the Asian Games Village.

If you do a hotel, the location requires convenient transportation, close to the business center, but I want to do a "home", it does not need so busy area, relatively quiet a little better, the surrounding living facilities are ready. The hardware requirements are kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, living room, small balcony must have, basically meet the standards of such as a home fast hotel.

In terms of service, of course, I want to create a community atmosphere, but there is a limit. If there are too many activities such as dinner and mountain climbing, it will also ruin the feeling of "home". We offer free indoor cleaning twice a week and free moving services. There is a small public area on the floor where you can meet friends for coffee and chat. Drinks are free.

My promotion channel is still online, Posting on 58.com and Ganji. Now more than 90% of my rooms are rented out. The total investment in this project is nearly 4 million yuan, and the decoration accounts for most of it. Our mainstream apartment is a one-bedroom of about 35 square meters, and the monthly rent is around 4,500 yuan, which is better than the free apartment.

In addition to Free House, there are also Rubik's Cube City Apartment, Plamen, New School Apartment, and so on on the market. The largest is Rubik's Cube City, which started in Nanjing with investment from Warburg Pincus and now has dozens of stores and about 6,000 apartments across the country.

I call it an "economy serviced apartment." We are a small start-up company with a team of only five people: Manager Yu and I, two store assistants and a cleaner.

These few people can manage dozens of rooms and serve all the tenants, the labor cost is much lower than other large companies.

I am now thinking about two things: one is to find investment. I am already in contact with some investment institutions. If I can get about 10 million dollars, I can open three to five more stores.

You have to have scale, you have to have a brand. Second, I want to introduce the mode of crowdfunding to attract small investments from some individuals. The house itself is an asset appreciation tool. I have a good cash flow and a clear expectation of earnings. This business is steady and steady. Perhaps you are my tenant, the apartment will provide you with a temporary home in the city; Maybe you could be my shareholder, too, and see how your money can be regenerated.