In October 2015, in Shenzhen, China Real Estate CEO Summit, a group of real estate officials gathered together to discuss the future. The summit focuses on transition, cross-border, and Internet+.

After the summit, once again we saw our old friend from Shenzhen Real Estate Circle, president of Topchain Group Du Jing. Du Jing pointed out that for the real estate industry, there is no doubt that in the next three to five years the transition from single to multiple, from lockup towards cross-border, from products to customers, from incremental to stock, and the embrace of internet with open arms, Internet + real estate, can be seen and must be achieved.

It is precisely under such trending insights that for the first time Topchain Group has put forward a brand-new concept of “Entrepreneurial Real Estate” in China. In Du Jing's words, “Entrepreneurial Real Estate” is a summary of Topchain based on its practice of fine real estate and revitalizing buildings during the past three years.

The Topchain Group was founded in 2012, and it has been three years till now. The three years has been of special significance to an entrepreneurial company like Topchain. With the development of “One year one work” in 2013, Shenzhen Topchain•Xin Zuo is created. In 2014, it is the Shenzhen Topchain•Jiu Zhu. In 2015, the Guangzhou Topchain•Bin Jiang. While intensively developing “fine real estate”, Topchain took advantage of the situation and quietly turned to test the revitalizing building business in 2015. In the domestic real estate industry, it mentioned "enterpreneurial real estate” for the first time.

In this regard, on issues related to entrepreneurial real estate, Tong Jing, president of Topchain Group, talked with the media about the transformation of housing enterprises under the Internet + tide and the future development direction of Topchain.

In Du Jing's view, the two core drivers for the transformation of housing enterprises are:

The first core driving force is the increasingly scarce land resources in the first-tier cities, which will transform the real estate development in two directions: one is from the incremental market to the stock market. Now, it is not wise to go to the first-tier cities to buy land and support the development of 50 billion and 100 billion RMB on a large scale. Uber can revitalize stock cars. Is it possible to revitalize stocks in real estate? Du Jing thinks that it may be the new direction of real estate transformation, that is, urban redevelopment; the other is the development of the housing enterprises from the scale development to intensive cultivation, that is, what Topchain has been doing, a fine real estate.

The second core driving force is the economic development, upgrading of demand and more diversification. Therefore, the entire industry has also changed from a single residential real estate to a diversified one, and has tried various fields such as commercial real estate, resort real estate, and retirement real estate, including entrepreneurial real estate mentioned below.

It is in this transformational trend that the redevelopment of the city brings new opportunities to entrepreneurial real estate.

Speak of city reconstruction. As we all know, residential real estate such as Vanke Si JI Hua Cheng. We get a clear piece of land between the urban and rural areas to build houses; this is what everyone has done. However, nowadays, there are no clear lands in many places in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and many provincial capital cities. Only the old ones can be counted on, so urban renewal must be carried out. This is a path to the reconstruction of the city.

But is it that all our old houses need to be rebuilt? After all, there are still many things that need to be preserved in China. There are reasons like this or that and a mark of the city should be preserved. This is the building's revitalization. It is another route to urban redevelopment. For example, the Hong Kong Married Police Quarters, which is revitalised as “PMQ”by the government; this is an original design base.

From the view of the customer orientation of the entrepreneurial real estate, there is a natural integration point with the building revitalization. Because entrepreneurs have relatively low rental capacity for property rents, but they need convenient transportation and perfect facilities, all being small teams, better geographical locations are more likely to form aggregation effects. What’s more, their requirements for physical space and construction grades are not so many. In first-tier cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen, new office buildings in urban areas are too costly to provide entrepreneurs with low-rent space, while the activation of old buildings in the city center can achieve this, in this way, the idle stock assets are also fully used.

“The entrepreneurial real estate is actually very simple. residential real estate is for people to live, vacation real estate is for people to go on vacation, and pension real estate is sheltering the elderly. Therefore, those for people to start businesses are called entrepreneurial real estate.”

Entrepreneurial real estate is essentially a full-fledged entrepreneurial ecosystem for entrepreneurs by providing physical space and integrating entrepreneurial incubator resources for entrepreneurs; its extension covers what we commonly call industrial real estate, creative parks, joint ventures, and incubators, etc to meet the full cycle of entrepreneurial ecological needs.

Simply speaking, the essence of entrepreneurial real estate is the same as when we sold a house. It is just like this, people want to buy the house because of they had just married and in need of a first-home of two rooms; some people wanted big house, some wanted a bigger one again, and someone wanted to buy a villa and buy a big house. The enterprise that comes from the incubators and enjoys free office space will slowly grow and be mature. In the end, it also needs an entire floor or even several floors. We hope to form an entrepreneurial ecological tree in the business park.

"Back to our real estate development industry, I think fundamentals of the real estate will not change. Regardless of whether it is the Internet+ or what, the demand for the house will always exist.” Du Jing said, “but the times are changing, we cannot be rigid for decades. At this time, we need to take a half step forward to innovate.” To seize the opportunity of the industry transformation, Topchain chose entrepreneurial real estate.

Entrepreneurial real estate is the practice of Du Jing’s idea of “building a platform for integrating resources to allow professional people to do professional things”. “Difference in profession makes one feel worlds apart. we return to the real estate industry, concentrate on providing physical space, integrate professional entrepreneurial teams, share platforms, hardware and software services, and create an industry-wide cycle of development platforms and full-scale entrepreneurial ecosystems, just like the real estate we accomplished. It is not necessarily a designing institute that you operate yourself, a construction unit that you build yourself, or marketing that you form your team yourself, but in fact it is a resource integration.”

In September 2015, Yangcheng Topchain, located in downtown Guangzhou, officially opened. Unlike pure incubators or joint offices, Yangcheng Tonghui is created by Tencent, Yangcheng Evening News, and Topchain Assets. It provides entrepreneurs with suitable physical space and supporting services according to their orientation, characteristics, affordability of rent, and demand for supporting services, and it is a shared platform for resource exchange and collaboration.

Yangcheng Topchain embraces Tencent’s first entrepreneurship space in Guangzhou and even in southern China. At the same time, it also brought in 3W, a well-known domestic startup incubator, which the Prime Minister had personally inspected twice. In the venture capital community, strategic cooperation has been established with IDG, Dachen, and Qifu and other well-known organizations. "Or, when we do entrepreneurial real estate, we do resources integration, make mainboards, and put up platforms and professional people do professional jobs."

According to Du Jing, since the opening of Guangzhou Topchain Commuinty, with a complete entrepreneurial ecological environment, the occupancy rates can still outperform the market although the rent has been nearly 50% higher than that of the same region.