At the same time, another head of the long-lease apartment circuit, Zuru, has been on the hot list of rights defense.
Two days ago, several Beijing-based landlords blocked the entrance to the company’s headquarters, demanding compensation for the contract termination. Most of them had received phone calls from Zuru since June this year, citing the epidemic as the reason for the rent reduction.
Back at the beginning of the year, the news that the landlords were facing forced termination of their contracts spread on the Internet. However, half a year has passed, but the situation has not improved, and cases of landlords who have been forced to terminate their leases continue to emerge. Until today, the micro-blog topic of the forced termination of contract with Zuru was read by 9.2 million people. Ru finally responded by saying that it would negotiate amicably and pay the penalty according to the contract.
But this does not eliminate the landlords’ discontent. Compared to the two months’ compensation, they also need to pay tens of thousands of yuan of decoration fees. “.
While the landlord and Self-Rule pulling endlessly, the tenants living in long term rental apartments gradually feel panic. In the external environment of a large number of egg-shell tenants being forced to withdraw, the thunder of the long lease apartments, but also stirred the heart of each of the Zuru customers. The winter in Beijing is coming fast and furious. After the winter, can Zuru, with millions of tenants, become a safe haven for young people?
Forced repossession costs tens of thousands of dollars in renovation costs.
“My previous rent was 4,760 yuan, but in September, without my consent, Self-Ru reduced my rent by 1,200 yuan, and only gave me more than 3,000 yuan, then after repeated communication, I waited until the 11th to make up for it. After waiting until November 22nd, Self-Ru automatically terminated the contract without negotiating with me. “
In June this year, Li Ming, the landlord of Zuru, received phone calls from time to time, discussing a rent reduction, citing the high vacancy rate caused by the epidemic. But in the case of unsuccessful negotiations, Li Ming’s rent was automatically terminated on November 22.
The same rent reduction also happened to Wang Feng. As early as August 2018, Wang Feng put his house in five-year custody to Zuru, but in April this year, Wang Feng was bombarded by phone calls from Zuru for the first time, “almost every day, more than a dozen phone calls a day, until the end of May, told me that the rent will be reduced from 7,280 yuan to 7,280 yuan. Reduced to $5,500, I disagreed and decided I wanted to return the lease. “
It is reported that many of the owners have received the request for rent reduction, either rent reduction or cancellation of the contract, which has become a helpless choice in front of the owners.
What really made them dissatisfied was the high renovation and appliance compensation fees hidden in the contract, which they had never expected before.
According to the “Asset Management Service Contract” signed between the landlord and Zuru, if the contract is terminated early, Party A shall pay Party B for the damages of renovation and new facilities. This provision was written into every escrow agreement with the landlord in the form of a contract, which the landlord had no right to change.
Li Ming, who was forced to terminate the contract, calculated that he would have to pay more than 4,000 yuan even with two months’ compensation.
For Wang Feng, the landlord, the loss was even greater. The rent penalty was calculated at more than 9,000 yuan for me, but he calculated the depreciation of the renovation, and the depreciation of furniture and appliances, which added up to more than 30,000 yuan, and the 9,000 yuan that should be paid to me combined, I still need to pay them more than 26,000 yuan. . “
My house itself was renovated before it was given to Zuru, but Zuru threw away the original appliances and replaced them with their own on the grounds that it was impossible to know the safety of the appliances, but did not give me any compensation. Now instead, we are asked to compensate for the renovation, which is too unreasonable. “
Under the storm of rights protection, can tenants still live with peace of mind?
While landlords are worried about rent reductions, tenants on the other end of the spectrum are also suffering from rent increases.
In the past few years, there have been a lot of people who have been living in the same house for a long time. The first thing you need to know is that you can’t afford to buy a new one.
I have compared the prices of the same type of apartment online, and basically they are all 200 yuan cheaper than my current rent, and now Beijing’s rents as a whole are dropping, but Zuru is raising prices, which is forcing our tenants to move. “Ran said.
According to the Shell Research Institute released a monthly report on the Beijing rental market in November, the volume of housing rental transactions in Beijing fell 3.8% in November from the previous month, and after the peak in the volume of residential rental transactions in August, the downward trend was maintained in September, October and November for three consecutive months.
In fact, the extent of the price increase was also written into the contract with the tenant. According to the contract, every year when the contract expires and is renewed, the price of self-rule will increase by about 3%-5%. However, during the downward period of the rental market, such a mechanism led tenants to prefer to surrender their leases and to choose new properties in the rental market.
After several comparisons of prices for the same type of apartment in the same neighborhood, Ran had to choose to give up her current apartment and move on to the next one. But after a few rental events, the rental itself has become a big headache for Ran.
I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to do that,” she said. “Ran confided to AI Finance News.
As a matter of fact, at the beginning of this year, the media exposed an incident in which Self-ru gave landlords lower rents and tenants raised rents.
At the same time, Zuru itself is also at risk of losing its target group. According to data released by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics, the number of resident foreigners in Beijing decreased by 770,000 between 2014 and 2019. Both the demolition of partitions in Beijing at the end of 2017 and the Internet layoffs in 2018 and 2019 have had a greater or lesser impact on the long-term rental apartment business represented by Zuru.
This year’s mass eviction of egg-shell apartment tenants has made tenants living in Zuru’s apartments particularly anxious. After all, countless past incidents of long term rental apartments have shown them that no tenant can stay out of the chaos.
As the largest company in China’s long term rental apartments, the early profits of Zuru were not optimistic. According to media reports, the cumulative loss of Zuru from 2015 to 2017 was nearly 1.3 billion yuan, and after 2018, Zuru launched multiple rounds of financing, and in March 2020, it ushered in a 1 billion U.S. dollar investment from Softbank, which raised its valuation to 6.6 billion U.S. dollars.
According to sources, as early as December last year, Zuru’s Beijing team started to adjust its structure, and Zhou Yijun, the former general manager of Shanghai City, became the new successor as the city’s general manager of Beijing. At one point, Zuru’s internal poster was changed to read: “Remember the Mission, Make Profit – Beijing,” and employees were asked to set it as a screen saver for their phones. To a certain extent, this also reflects the profit pressure in the long term rental market.
When long-stay apartments are no longer favored by capital, can the eggshells and ziru, who lack the ability to create their own blood, continue to be confident and confident?
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