Reality of Chinese Primary Market Bites as FangDD Posts Heavy Quarterly Losses

Chinese property portal operator FangDD has released a report for its Q3 activities with the numbers not looking so good for the NASDAQ listed company.

As seen with fellow Chinese portal operator Beike, the turmoil that swept through the Chinese primary real estate market with the default of the country's largest developer Evergrande impacted quarterly results substantially.

FangDD's Revenue for the three months ended September 30th was down by 57% on the previous quarter and 53% down year-on-year. Quarterly net loss was also the worst since Q$ of 2018 at 55 million.

Aside from its financials, FangDD lost 44% of its agents and saw transaction volume facilitated down by 48% in the quarter with company Chairman and Co-Chief Executive Officer, Mr. Yi Duan, commenting:

“Impacted by the macroeconomic regulation and the tightening of mortgage loans, the real estate market has rapidly cooled off and credit risk for developers has been intensifying. We expect that new and resale property transactions will remain vulnerable to macro challenges for an extended period.

However, from a long-term perspective, we believe that under the current policies guided by the principle that housing is for living in but not for speculation, the industry will enter a new era of healthy and steady development following the market adjustment. Industry participants’ demand for the digital transformation of real estate assets and in-depth asset management services will stand strong, and give rise to new growth opportunities for the industry.”

Among other market-related setbacks during the quarter, the company reported that it has had to substantially scale back its Yuancui business partnership with Shanghai Yuancui Information Technology Co., Ltd which it signed last year to bring technology-enabled solutions, franchise branding, and operational efficiency improvements for agents.

FangDD (not to be confused with Fang.com) does not define itself as a portal and considers Beike rather than portal sites Anjuke and Fang.com to be its biggest rival as more of an end-to-end transaction platform. While the impact on Anjuke and Fang.com are harder to gauge (Anjuke recently pulled out of a planned IPO), Beike has also seen its business badly impacted by the state of the Chinese primary real estate market over the last few months.