TikTok Owner ByteDance to Spin Off Real Estate Listings Business

ByteDance, the owner of the popular mobile app TikTok, plans to spin off its real estate listing business as part of an ongoing company restructuring.

According to a Bloomberg report, the Chinese company is in talks with external investors to raise capital to spin off its Xingfuli real estate listings business and take on the likes of Anjuke, Beike and Fang.

Xingfuli is a mobile-app based real estate listings platform launched in 2018 and acquired by ByteDance a year later. The listings from Xingfuli are promoted across ByteDance's popular Jinri Toutiao content aggregation app in much the same way as listings from other portfolio apps (ByteDance owns apps working in many different verticals from healthcare to cars).

The move comes as ByteDance looks to overhaul its corporate structure and establish itself as a more westernised company as Chinese authorities have been cracking down on monopolistic behaviour and personal data abuse.

ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming actually started a real estate listings business in 2009 named Jiujiufang from which he resigned as CEO in 2011.

The move to spin off the company's real estate business comes as several of Xingfuli's competitors feel the effects of China's burst primary real estate bubble. Since the threat of a default for the country's largest developer Evergrandein September, portal companies including Beike parent company KE Holdings and FangDD have reported severely impacted revenues.