It was a very, very fortuitous meeting, and I met the owner of a real estate company that I thought was about to go bankrupt, and you must have heard the name of this company.
Born in a small place, but also pushed by the bubble to expand rapidly, at the cusp of the times, but also as an industry dark horse, in the city and the project to conquer the city, of course, the back of the things we all know, now this enterprise shrinks the contraction, the thunderstorm of the thunderstorm, the compression of the compression ......Maintain the dignity on the surface, but the inside is ready to close the door completely, I met him at a recent dinner, and there seems to be no New Year's joy on his face, and there is no relaxation for the rest of his life, but a face of exhaustion and vicissitudes I touched a glass with him, drank some wine, and asked casually:How did you feel in the past two yearsI didn't expect this question, and it can be regarded as completely opening his conversation box, and the following content is what I said to me while drinking, in order to make it easier to express, let's call this friend Lao Chen.
In fact, many people will say that the difficulties encountered by real estate companies are the tight cash flow, the fact that the house is not so welcome, and the change ...... customer demandBut in Lao Chen's eyes, these are secondary, and what makes him feel pessimistic the most isIt's that I feel that my company is an existence that is contrary to the whole era
He drew me a picture, which I thought was interesting
For the past 20 years, for a real estate company, all talent has been built around one keyword:Self-systemWhat does it mean that in the past 20 years, the attention of developers is not to care about the external environment, at the very beginning, everyone is doing research and development, product standardization, and then when they start to do scale, all developers began to pay attention to land acquisition, urban layout.
Then when the property market was the craziest, financial thinking dominated, how to finance, how to leverage, how to borrow became the main theme until the thunderstorm, almost the developer's talent system vision was looking at itself.
Lao Chen joked with me that his soldiers were now trained in the past with only one skill: how to start from scratch better.
After a project goes from land acquisition to product positioning to development to marketing cycle to market entry to payment collection to liquidation, it immediately enters the next land acquisition cyclen times from 0 to 1, and then n years passed like this
The power of inertia is really scaryBecause of this, I lost my perception of the customer and didn't care much about what the user was thinking, but unfortunately, the industry faced in this round was not the cycle of the cycleIt's a change of timesAfter the overall supply and demand reversal, market expectations disappeared and everything changed
I don't know what will happen in the future, but it is clear that the talent system built by the company in the past is contrary to the future era, and the company has always been aware of the need to transform, but when it is necessary to solve the problem, it is found that no one is available.
This is the most discouraged place for the boss, the external wind and rain are not very likely to make a boss completely desperate, the boss himself has not seen anything in the wind and rain in the past 20 years, but the internal sloppiness is fatal, the resignation of resignation, lying flat, confused, confused, I asked a little more:Didn't your son come at this time?
Lao Chen sighed and said: The matter of high-speed expansion is led by his son, Lao Chen, this company was originally only a snake in one place, but the industry at that time was crazy, as if it would be eliminated by the whole era if it did not speed up.
In the words of Lao Chen:At that time, if you didn't move the company to Shanghai and set up a headquarters in Hongqiao, you would be looked down upon by your peers
You can feel the atmosphere and the feeling of that time.
Son's premature **, son's premature failure, now it's up to Lao Chen himself.
Whether the mental strength supports the enterprise to go one step further and one more stepAnother dimension: on the output side of our own, we have seen many reports that the sales of today's real estate companies are gradually declining, how to reduce, but in Lao Chen's eyes, a fundamental reason is: now the products they make and the current customers have beenNot in one dimensionAnd most of the real estate companies are like this, product homogenization is inevitable
Under the self system, the product research and development logic will not care what the customer wants, the original product team is relatively weak within the company, and when the product has a problem, it mainly relies on stacking and superimposing, so Lao Chen said to me very seriously: It's not that there are no customers, but not at a level of communication, now customers want to listen to the humanistic heritage of community life, we say that their houses are high-end and atmospheric.
In the sales office, the two sides are not at the same frequency at all, so how can customers choose your current customers is not not to buy a house, but the house they need, there is no ** on the market at present.
And helplessly, even if he sees such a change, Lao Chen feels that his current system can't help itThe biggest chasmThe speed of change of customers is much greater than the speed of product iteration in the property marketThis is also why many people will buy some niche brands these days, mainly because they don't have a sense of customer experience after they don't do scale, of course, they are not deliberately cultivated, and now they say afterwards that they have customer thinking developers are also considered an afterthought, in that crazy era of the property market, in fact, no one knows how to do it, but it is a small-scale enterprise, and the attention is not so scattered, so such a real estate company is more like a real estate company, and it is difficult to let the company that starts by speed change again.
Now, although the attention is no longer focused on scale and self, but soon the attention is absorbed by other dimensions, and the new rules of the game have not yet been learned, and the old structural shackles have not been freedThis is the current situation of a down-and-out real estate company
In addition, in Lao Chen's eyes, the biggest change in the industry is not only the expected change.
The needs of the industry are getting differentTriageThis is the reason why Lao Chen is most afraid of the previous industry has always been cyclical, precisely because there is no way to replace real estate demand, which is also the reason why many developers have no fear in the past.
Why do we believe in speed and why we believe in scale, because the demand can only be met through the developer, and finally the terminal will be satisfied, but in the past five years, under the concept of housing not speculation, a large amount of demand has been truly diverted
The soundness of the rental market, the protection of different dimensions, and the stock that has been retained from the elder system mean that buying a house has become a very, very courageous thing now, if the industry in the past was pushed by a huge force, then the current industry is not shrinking in the eyes of Lao ChenInstead, it gives you 10,000 roadsAnd these 10,000 roads don't give you 10,000 choices at one originRatherThere were three forks in the road every time I took a step, and after two or three steps from memory, I began to lose my rhythm.
And it is precisely when developers will only take one path and need to think about whether to continue on this road, many companies get lost while walking, and disappear as they walk
So why not slow down.
This is the last question I asked Lao Chen, in my eyes, all the original sin of real estate is because it is too fast.
Because it's too fast, it's out of control, because it's too fast, it's wrong, because it's too fast, so the risk is superimposed, as long as you're willing to slow down, the problem will be slowly solved, and the company will slow down, Lao Chen glanced at me and said: Do you think slow is a choice, but it's actually the oppositeSlow is one of a kindCapabilitiesFor Lao Chen's company now, it's not that he doesn't want to be slow, but that he can't be slow.
If it really slows down, the company will collapse at a faster speed, and this is exactly the fatal mistake made by the company five years ago after it became a dark horse enterprise, when the company wanted to be fast, it meant that the talent system and structure were rebuilt, and it was also from that time that the company had the ability to create speed, but also lost the possibility of hedging risks. I immediately understood the powerlessness in his eyes, and the current business is like throwing people into the sea and then telling him: start learning to swim now.
The tide rises and falls, and there is no one in the waterThe limbs fluttered, and the shore was far awayBecause of this feeling, Lao Chen told me very calmly that he would pack up a few projects in his hand and prepare to close the door.
Lao Chen jokingly said to me: If I delete your WeChat one day, don't be surprised, just because I don't have any nostalgia for this industry.
Finally I asked, "Is this the end of it?" and he smiled and saidThese areTimesChoice