Real estate embraces virtual reality sales
Print Edition
Beyond zoos, museums and games, virtual reality technologies are wooing more followers in a more unexpected Chinese sector: real estate.
VR sales rooms and live streaming have become popular with the country’s property developers and agents looking to pitch would-be house buyers temporarily kept away from traditional offline marketing due to the novel coronavirus epidemic.
The proportion of online VR house visitors surged 57.7 percent month on month in January, according to online marketplace 58.com and housing-information platform anjuke.com. Another online housing platform, Beike, showed more than 1.24 million VR visits were made between February 1 and 9, skyrocketing almost 60 times year on year.
The VR marketing boom is one of the property sector’s moves to keep itself afloat during the epidemic.
Official data released yesterday indicates home prices in 70 major Chinese cities remained generally stable in January, with 47 of the 70 cities reporting month-on-month gains, down from 50 cities in December. Yet the bite of the epidemic is likely to be reflected in February’s housing-investment-and-sales data because prevention-and-control measures have increased this month.
Amid the epidemic, many cities have suspended housing-sales activities, as well as constructing apartments, weighing on the capital-intensive sector’s operation.
Despite increasing downward economic pressure, Chinese authorities have kept a tight lid on housing-market-speculation.
The country will stick to the principle that “housing is for living in, not for speculation,” along with the implementation of a long-term-management mechanism for the market, said Finance Minister Liu Kun in a recent story from the Qiushi Journal, a flagship magazine of the Communist Party of China Central Committee.
While avoiding large-scale stimulus, some local governments have stepped in to help the sector get through this challenging period.
Cities including southeast China’s Xiamen and Fuzhou unveiled a string of incentives, including credit support, financing-rate reductions and repayment-expiration extensions to ease the property-market strain.
Some Chinese developers also took to price-cutting to lure customers. China Evergrande Group, the third-largest developer in China, said on Sunday that it would offer a 25-percent discount for all property sales from February 18 to 29.
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