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Economy

Building opportunities in booming real estate sales

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2015-08-17 10:18Shanghai Daily Editor: Wang Fan

As Shanghai emerges from a long housing slump, real estate agencies are mushrooming across the city and workers are being sucked into the industry by the prospect of big salaries and commissions.

Shanghai Lianjia, the city's largest agency, tripled its outlets to more than 600 in July from 200 in March. The company, a merger of Shanghai Deovolente Realty Co and Beijing-based Homelink, has more than 10,000 agents, a third of them college graduates.

The expansion is also occurring in the digital realm. Online brokerage platform iwjw.com, established in March, recently said its team of agents in Shanghai has grown to some 2,000.

"It's common to have hundreds of calls a day," said Jacqueline Yuan, a college graduate who became an agent a little more than one month ago. "We work from 9am to 9pm and get one day a week off. Some of my colleagues even spend whole nights on negotiations."

It's all a stark contrast from a few years back, when governments tried to deflate a housing bubble by slapping stricter controls on mortgages and on the number of properties a person could buy. The resulting slump in sales left many real estate offices empty.

But government has relaxed mortgage restrictions and made it easier for people to buy multiple homes, which are usually for investment purposes. In addition, the central bank has cut interest rates three times this year. As a result, the housing industry is back in the pink. Competition is once again fierce as everyone tries to get a slice of the pie.

Many property companies have lifted their base salaries to retain good staff and attract new agents. No longer does an agent have to rely only on commission to put food on the table. Many agencies offer base salaries of more than 3,000 yuan ($470) a month, with those at iwjw.com reaching as high as 6,000 yuan. That compares with a city minimum wage of 2020 yuan.

However, those in the industry say they have to work hard for their money.

College graduate Yu Huiquan, 31, is among the lucky ones. His performance was tops at Deovolente last year, with annual sales of 25 million yuan and a personal income of nearly 80,000 yuan.

The former IT developer became a real estate agent in 2010.

"Agents who surpass the 'one-million-yuan' mark do so by handling big properties, such as luxury homes selling for more than 10 million yuan," he said in Deovolente's Xintiandi outlet.

Real estate agencies generally charge sellers a commission of 2 percent of the property value. Agents can receive 20 percent to 30 percent of the commission.

"This year is particularly good," Yu said. "Many people made a lot of money in the stock market, before it crashed, and they put that money into property."

In July, Shanghai sales of the new luxury homes costing 50,000 yuan per square meter or more, exceeded 1,300 units for a second straight month. Sales of existing homes totaled 200,700 units in the first seven months, surpassing the whole of 2014, according to Deovolente.

Lianjia said it had 72 agents in the "one-million-yuan" category in the first six months of this year.

You see them everywhere in the city.

A pack of agents is milling about in front of a residential community in the Huangpu District. They are carrying placards with photos and prices of nearby homes, and trying to hand out leaflets to passers-by. There are five real estate agencies in the block.

One resident, surnamed Wu, who declined to give her full name, said that she uploaded information about an apartment she wanted to lease on an online property site one evening. The next morning, she said, several agents showed up with potential tenants.

"In the following days, dozens more came," she said. "One agent told me if I leased the apartment to her tenant, she wouldn't charge me a service fee."

Yu told Shanghai Daily that many people seeking to buy or sell properties prefer to deal with agents who have the most experience.

For newbies like Jacqueline Yuan, 28, chasing that first sales contract is a slog. Perhaps for her, doubly hard because she is one of the few women working in a male-dominated industry.

"It is rather exhausting, physically and mentally," she said. "But you have to persist and learn as you go."

Sitting in her office at 10:30 on a Saturday night, Yuan had just spent a long time on WeChat, trying to persuade a client to allow the agency's photographer to shoot photos of an apartment.

"Communications can be difficult," she said. "You have to build trust with clients."

A second-year college student, Hou Yuan, said he is thinking of becoming a real estate agent when he graduates.

"I won't say it's a dream job, but the income is attractive," he said. "It's not easy nowadays to find decent work."

  

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