Juli Xinfang Raises Tens of Millions of Dollars in Series B+ Round Led by Eight Roads, with Strategic Investment from 58 Group and Follow-on from Existing Shareholder Source Code Capital

源码资本·September 7, 2018·2·4

Save Money and Buy a Good Home

New-home e-commerce platform Juli Xinfang recently closed a Series B+ round of tens of millions of US dollars, setting new records for both valuation and funding amount in the new-home e-commerce sector.

The round was led by Eight Roads, the proprietary assets investment arm of Fidelity International, with follow-on investments from existing shareholders Source Code Capital and Vertex Ventures China. 58 Group made a strategic investment, and Zhiyuan Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor.

Founded in 2015, Juli Xinfang was among the earliest Chinese internet companies to focus exclusively on new-home transactions. While e-commerce models have come to cover most product categories in recent years, real estate e-commerce has lagged behind due to low transaction frequency, long decision cycles, complex products, and unique transaction processes.

As an existing Series A investor, Source Code Capital has witnessed Juli Xinfang's growth firsthand. Xingshi Wang, Executive Director at Source Code Capital, commented: "Juli Xinfang deconstructs every step of the transaction process, using internet tools to optimize efficiency and experience at each stage. This has dramatically improved overall transaction efficiency and service quality, creating a win-win-win for upstream and downstream clients as well as consultants."

Juli Xinfang has pioneered a dual-engine model combining proprietary data systems with a directly managed service team, seamlessly integrating digitized property information with end-to-end consultant services. This delivers a "save money, buy a good home" experience for users while significantly boosting efficiency. After three years of development, Juli Xinfang far exceeds industry averages in user satisfaction, transaction cycle time, and per-capita productivity.

Juli Xinfang CEO Wang Peng believes: "The evolution of e-commerce has always moved from high-frequency to low-frequency goods, and from light-decision to heavy-decision purchases. Following automotive e-commerce, real estate e-commerce is now reaching a mature stage in terms of technology and market conditions. Traditional property transactions have been fragmented,粗放, and poor in user experience, severely dragging down industry efficiency. Juli hopes to bring some change to the industry, gradually replacing traditional marketing with an e-commerce model that emphasizes matching efficiency, data, and service."

In 2017, while the existing-home market declined, the new-home market continued to grow. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, national commercial housing sales exceeded 13 trillion RMB in 2017, up 13.7% year-over-year. The shortage of total housing stock in first-tier cities will likely continue to worsen. The recent heated discussion around rising rents in Beijing also signals insufficient housing supply in core cities.

China's core urban clusters will continue to attract large net inflows of population. Many cities are currently increasing or will increase land supply. Resale restrictions on existing homes are also pushing buyers toward the new-home market. Meanwhile, urban cluster planning and construction around Chinese cities will generate substantial new-home demand. Yet developers face mounting pressure from land costs and financing difficulties, making turnover rate an increasingly critical metric.

Under these shifting trends, traditional marketing and customer acquisition methods either fail to deliver actual transactions or severely degrade user experience and damage brands — problems that are becoming increasingly pronounced.

On the user side, the low-frequency nature of real estate transactions and complexity of decision-making information means much critical information gets overlooked or concealed. Users' limited ability to evaluate this information can lead to buying the wrong property or missing out on suitable ones.

Wang Peng noted: "Cases of buying wrong or missing out are very common. Juli leverages its powerful systems and professional consultants to organize the most suitable information according to each user's needs, supporting fast and effective decision-making. At the same time, Juli was the first in China to introduce free one-on-one chauffeured property tours, contract assistance, and price-difference compensation policies, allowing users to enjoy a comfortable, worry-free one-stop home purchase experience — truly achieving 'save money, buy a good home.'"

In terms of technology investment, Juli Xinfang's ratio of technical to service staff reaches 1:3, the highest in the industry. The company continuously employs big data and AI to improve transaction experience and efficiency. This not only enables its directly managed consultant team to better use tools and systems to provide users with guaranteed information and services, but also optimizes the entire service system through algorithmic improvements. This ensures the industry's highest user satisfaction and per-capita productivity, and provides strong momentum for Juli Xinfang's continuous and stable cross-city expansion.

Regarding its directly managed service team, Juli Xinfang's consultants have the highest proportion of graduates from Project 985 and Project 211 universities in the industry. Monthly turnover is below 5%, far below the industry average. To date, the team has provided tour services for 50,000 user groups and generated over 100,000 tour reports, including recommended properties and area profiles, market analysis, and personalized solutions to user questions — earning widespread positive feedback from users.

According to statistics, Juli Xinfang has received 860,000 words of authentic positive reviews written by users. Many users who experienced the service firsthand expressed willingness to recommend it to friends.

The lead investor in this round, Eight Roads, is the proprietary assets investment institution of Fidelity International Limited, with over 20 years of venture capital experience in China, focused on developing innovative and valuable businesses. As the lead institution, Eight Roads noted that it had tracked Juli Xinfang for nearly a year during its industry scanning process. Zang Jialun, Managing Partner of Eight Roads Asia, stated: "Real estate services and proptech are related to consumer and fintech, which are long-term focus areas for Eight Roads. Both developers and homebuyers currently face new pain points and demands, urgently needing more efficient and higher-quality transaction and other services." Zang Jialun believes: "Juli Xinfang efficiently serves both buyers and sellers through online precision customer acquisition and offline quality service, building strong word-of-mouth among developers and consumers. Its data-driven operations significantly improve transaction efficiency and can build long-term moats."

Also as an existing shareholder, Vertex Ventures China has consistently valued Juli Xinfang's new-channel value in the real estate market. Xu Ying, Executive Partner at Vertex Ventures China, said: "Through continuous validation, Juli Xinfang has gradually developed an increasingly mature approach. Using data to identify potential users and facilitate transactions represents a strong commercial application in the new-home sales vertical during the transition from online-ization to intelligence, achieving efficiency gains in real estate."

"Real estate media platforms or franchise-based trading platforms are transitional products from when technology couldn't yet cover offline scenarios. The end-state model will inevitably be a directly managed media-plus-trading platform with integrated online and offline data." Michael Mao, Founding Partner of Zhiyuan Capital, believes Juli Xinfang is already at the forefront of the industry in this regard.

For most people, "living poorly" is a persistent pain point. In response, Wang Peng hopes to use technology to create the best experience and highest efficiency in connecting homebuyers with homes. Technology-driven new-home transactions are just a starting point. He emphasized: "In the future, Juli Xinfang will continue to increase technology investment to better connect every person with their ideal living scenario. What we pursue is precisely the meaning of the 'Juli' brand: satisfying all ideals people have about where they live."

Currently, Juli Xinfang operates in 11 cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Suzhou, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Foshan, and Jiaxing. Monthly unique visitors average approximately 7 million, with cumulative GMV reaching 30 billion RMB.

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