Fangdd, a popular Chinese real-estate platform announced they had closed a series C funding of $223 million USD led by Fountainvest Partners this July.
The company announced series B funding of $80 million USD just two months ago from Vision Knight Capital China Fund, Lightspeed China Partners, and CDH Venture Partners. The Chinese government has recently eased restrictions on owning multiple homes in China, meaning that services like Fangdd are becoming increasingly profitable.
“Fangdd’s series C funding was already completed by the end of July. The reason why we kept it secret for a while was that we wanted our team to focus our energy to the later half of 2015,” said Fangdd founder and CEO Duan Yi. To this date, Shenzhen-based company operates in 50 cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou.
Founded in January 2011, the Fangdd is a real estate platform connecting property sellers to home buyers to purchase a new house or second-hand house. The company is based on a “pay-for-performance” model, different from other domestic online estate services that charge customers for listing property information on the platforms, like SouFun and Anjuke.
China has started easing bans on people owning multiple homes, a restriction that was originally aimed at cooling the country’s property market. On September 8th, the ministry of housing and urban-rural development and the ministry of finance have lowered the downpayment required on a second apartment to 20 percent. These policies could provide a valuable chance for real estate services like Fangdd.
According to data released by the company, Fangdd cooperates with more than 5,000 real estate agencies courntry wide and lots of first-tier real estate developers including Vanke, Poly Group, Greenland Group, Longfor, Wanda. The company previously received 50 million RMB ($780,000 USD) series A financing from CDH Venture in July 2013.
Fangdd.com will use the proceeds from its latest round of funding for improving second home and new home services, upgrade user experience and service, and improve platform technology and finance functions, said Xiao Li, one of the partners invested in last year’s funding as well as the new round.
Image Credit: Fangdd