In the summer of 20 years old, I was preparing to go to Shenzhen for an internship. Old Xie from the next dormitory ran to my dormitory one afternoon, saying that what to go to the south ah, the cultural desert, go with me to Beijing.
At that time, in fact, I had already contacted a unit in Shenzhen. But the strange thing is that the yellow, thin, pimple-faced old Xie seems to have a reality-distorting power.
Thinking overnight, eyes closed and opened, the ticket to Shenzhen returned, bought a K-head hard seat. Carrying a backpack, and old Xie Lao Cao together, sat for fifteen hours of hard seat, to Beijing.
But out of Beijing West Station, two eyes in the dark. At first, I stayed in a small hotel next to Lao Xie’s internship unit. It was a small hotel, but it was a basement in a small, old, run-down community on Fowai Street. A door, a long narrow passage down, is a small room, the public toilet in the middle.
The air is filled with an indescribable smell.
The basement has a high turnover of people. Next to the Fu Wai Cardiovascular Hospital, in addition to the northern drifters from the north and south, there are many families of patients from abroad. If you pull a tenant out at random, you can tell a long story. Fine cut to duck neck general long.
The three of us live in a house. A dozen square meters, only three beds, a TV, can not put any extra things, and the building compared to the basement, in addition to a lot cheaper, the most important thing is that the room can be paid a day. 15 pieces per day, no deposit, want to run away at any time.
The owner’s wife is also nice. Seeing that we have just entered the society, sometimes the room fee will be delayed for a week, and she will not put a notice on our door to urge us to move out. In the dark underground space, we ushered in the life of a drifter in the north.
Lao Xie had an internship in Beijing where he could stay. Cao and I were “naked” and the first two months were too hard. The first two months were too hard. There were very few responses to the resumes that were submitted, and sometimes there were interviews that took an hour or two on the bus to get there and back, just like the hammered cows.
When it was hardest, I often had only a dozen dollars in my pocket. At that time, there was no microblogging, no long term rental apartments, and no rental loans. Of course, if there was such a great financial innovation as rental loans, we would have borrowed it. Because even if the basement, the rent is still the biggest expense in the north.
One day Cao couldn’t hold on anymore and said he wanted to buy a train ticket to go home. I dragged him to a roadside stall near the Vantone building and drank a dozen bottles of Yanjing, making him drink so much that he went back to his room and vomited with the trash can. In this way, I helped him to eat his ticket money in one breath, he did not say home.
1
The reason I rambled so much is because I saw another story of a 20-year-old graduate the other day.
Xiao Zhong, a tenant of an eggshell apartment in Guangzhou, sent his last circle of friends “Sorry” at 3:07 a.m., then set his apartment on fire and leapt down from the 18th floor.
Xiao Zhong, born in 2000, had just graduated from a vocational and technical college. In September, he signed a one-year lease with Eggshell Apartments, renting a small studio. Because he didn’t have a job, he chose the eggshell rental loan, and the rent plus other fees totaled 1,450 yuan a month, or less than 18,000 yuan a year.
During the three months he lived in the single room, he would occasionally go out for interviews and spend most of the time in the house playing games. His roommate said he was looking for a job, but he had been in a pending job. At the end of last month, a notice from the landlord was also posted on the door of his apartment, saying that he had not received any rent from the eggshell for two months.
You have one week to vacate this room after seeing the notice.
In the afternoon of December 1, he suddenly said to his roommate that I was going back home, because I had to pay rent, eat, and pay for utilities here. Go back to work for two months to pay off the rent loan.
This is a tragedy. Xiao Zhong’s suicide has not yet been officially concluded, and it remains to be investigated in more depth as to what motivated his arson regardless of his roommate’s safety and whether the eggshells were the last straw that crushed him.
But seeing his story always reminds me of the afternoon when Cao was lying in the next bed, screaming to go back home.
Unlike Xiao Zhong, Lao Cao did not have a rent loan, and did not somehow carry more than 10,000 in debt as soon as he walked into society. If he had at that time, he could not carry down, what will happen to the fate of the change, is really an unknown.
When the accident of the ride, some people said why not to play a special car; long rent apartment thunder, some people said why to borrow rental loans; now eggshell tenants jumped, and some people said 10,000 only.
Contemporary does not eat meat surimi people, is the internal taste.
The first two years of graduation is the most important for young people in their twenties. Destiny is easy because of some small things, a huge divide. A classmate’s snub, a dozen bottles of Yanjing, you can change the fate of a young man.
Not to mention the ten thousand or even tens of thousands of debts falling from the sky.
This session of long term rental apartments, eggshell apartments alone, the “social university”, in the cold winter, educated hundreds of thousands of young people. It is easy to make young people who have just come out of school doubt the world if they are not well guided.
In fact, after walking through this basement, a floor of beer bottles, rent loans of youth. Walk through this twenty years old, and then encounter anything, it is not a matter. What does not defeat us, makes us stronger.
Unfortunately, Xiao Zhong can not wait for this day.
2
Forgive my ignorance, but the first time I heard about eggshell apartments was the post that hit the screen on August 1, 2018 on the Mizuki Forum. The title of that post was called.
Capital eyes on rental housing, to suck the blood of young people, right.
The author of that post in Mizuki is named Xian Flutter. His real name is Liu Weiwei, is an employee of an Internet company. He said he had listed a three-bedroom apartment in Beijing’s Tiantongyuan on 58.com for rent, but several companies came over to grab the room, taking turns to offer it. Eggshell also promised a 2% annual increase.
Liu Weiwei also said that capital entering the rental market, high prices to lose money to seize the source of housing to do operations, disrupt the market, long-term monopoly of a large number of housing sources, and eventually raise rents, sucking the blood of young people.
It is really terrible to think about.
Liu Weiwei could not think of. He could not have imagined that the few hundred words he wrote would be sued by the capital later; he could not have imagined that he had unintentionally become the earliest whistle blower in China’s long term rental apartment industry.
A few months before this post, residential rents in China’s first and second-tier cities were facing an unprecedented round of increases. By July 2018, residential rents in Beijing had risen 22% year-over-year, and Shanghai was up 16%. Second-tier cities are not far behind, with Chengdu surprisingly rising by more than 30%.
High housing prices have young people looking over their shoulders. Even crueler than that, they find themselves soon unable to afford to rent a room. A single room in Beijing, may have to catch up with their small half-month salary.
In the past two years, many young people in Beijing went south to Shenzhen and Hangzhou. There is even radical talk of investing in nothing more than a southern version of Song. This has to do with the overall economic downturn in the north, but also with the jump in rent in Beijing around 2018.
There are many reasons for the jump. However, the role played by long-lease apartments in the process is even more side-splitting. With the capital boost, the long-lease apartment companies have spared no expense in order to quickly seize the market. This is the same as the past battles between Mobay and Ofo, Drip and Fast – burning a lot of money in the short term and using capital for market share.
So in the end, the capital does things that look like losses, but the money he loses is for others to pay. He single-handedly took away the money for himself.
Gao Jing, the founder of eggshells, and Lu Zhengyao, the owner of RuiXing, both like to talk about doctrine, and think about this matter in their hearts. Even the capital that invested in them, have crossed paths, such as pleasure capital.
Eggshell has accumulated losses of 6 billion yuan, and other long term rental apartments are not doing well. There are many long term rental apartment companies that are P2P companies. But they are losing money, and ultimately the whole society is paying the bill.
In a sense, the eggshells are worse than P2P, which harvests the middle class and the rich, while the eggshells harvest almost 100% of the young people at the bottom of the social ladder. They are willing to pay a year’s rent at a time through rental loans in order to save a few hundred dollars in rent. Once evicted, many are living on the streets.
Rental housing is the most livelihood area. There is no speculation in housing, and there should have been no speculation in rent. Because a storm, for young people is a loss of thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. The money for the capital is not called money, but for the young people who just graduated, it is not money. That is the dream, is life.
3
The second time I heard about eggshell apartments was from the mouth of Hu Jinghui, former vice president of My Love Home.
Half a month after Liu Weiwei posted that post, Hu Jinghui suddenly blasted the long-lease apartments: the long-lease apartments, represented by eggshell apartments, were competing for housing at 20% to 40% higher than normal prices in order to expand their scale, destroying the housing rental market.
At that time, I Love Home had just listed on the shell and launched its own long term rental apartment brand “Xiangfang”. The chairman of my home called Hu Jinghui overnight and told him to keep his mouth shut, and issued an announcement saying that Hu’s remarks had nothing to do with the company.
The next day, Hu Jinghui resigned from my Aiya. But then he opened a conference and said.
Half of the top ten long term rental apartments in China will burst one after another, which must be more powerful than the P2P burst.
At that time, many people in the industry said that Hu Jinghui’s depression was back and he was sick.
Eggshell Apartments also quickly took Liu Weiwei to court. Eggshell said the posting led them to be interviewed by the competent authorities several times, their social image was in shambles and they suffered significant economic losses, asking Liu Weiwei to pay 1 million yuan in compensation.
More than a year later, Beijing was not allowed to do “N+1” anymore, the epidemic came, and rents started to fall. The aggressive long term rental apartment companies began to break their capital chains, one by one, and the mines burst. Tenants’ money went down the drain, and landlords didn’t receive their rent.
For eggshells, times may be a bit tougher. Their founder, Gao Jing, was suddenly taken away for investigation, and external equity and debt financing all came to a halt, breaking the capital chain completely.
Everything is as predicted by Hu Jinghui. The depressed people who were squeezed by the industry really became the whistle blowers of long term rental apartments.
Eggshell’s lawsuit against Liu Weiwei was also dismissed, and the Beijing court found that the fact that eggshell had increased its price to grab rooms objectively existed. Surprisingly, the eggshells were not convinced and went on to appeal. In March this year, eggshell lost the case again.
They really, really had the face to sue.
Eleven months ago, eggshells went public in the US. It took a real-life model house for young tenants to the entrance of the New York Stock Exchange. Gao Jing, the founder of eggshell, said he wanted to provide a warm shell for every young person in a foreign country.
These days, a tearful video has moved many people. A usually serious father went to Shanghai to see his daughter, and when he came to his daughter’s small rental house, the father was heartbroken and in tears. He felt his daughter was aggrieved, and the two wiped their tears while transferring money.
Six months ago, Eggshell released its first quarter earnings report for 2020, which was the second earnings report released after their IPO. The first quarter loss was $1.23 billion, with $9 billion in liabilities due within a year, and 419,000 listings under their umbrella.
This means that hundreds of thousands of twenty-somethings may be sad this winter.
At the end of last month, the SEC announced the punishment of Lu Zhengyao, the former chairman of Ruiying Coffee. Suspected of a number of letter disclosure issues such as connected transactions and subsidiary mergers, a combined fine of 300,000 yuan was imposed on Lu’s boss.
I wonder what price will be paid by the promoters of this business gamble with eggshells.
Zhou Zuoren has lamented that after reading so many books, he got a total of two sentences of lessons.
Good ideas are written in books and never realized at all.
Bad things are done on earth, only a small part of the books remembered.
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