Can "Internet Thinking" Fix Renting for Young People? QDaily Has 39 Findings

Are the apparent "innovations" of branded long-term rental apartments and similar services a real attempt to meet users' needs, or a wishful misreading of what young people want? Do young people really believe that "the apartment is rented, but life isn't"?

If you stayed in a big city after college, you have probably been through — or are going through — some of these rough renting experiences:

• The day the dorm throws you out arrives, your new job doesn't start for another week, so you crash at a friend's place while you hunt for an apartment;
• You haul a huge suitcase around under a blazing sun to see places, they turn out to be wrecks, and your mood wilts like a dead flower;
• You go cross-eyed over maps: several compounds look about the same distance from the office, but there is no way to tell what they are really like without going, so you crisscross the city;
• You start out full of confidence, then find that the cheap, good-looking listings on rental sites are fake from top to bottom — photos, price, floor plan — and the only real thing is the agent's phone number;
• The agents' tricks run deep: the first two apartments they show you are dumps, and the slightly better one they recommend afterward costs a fortune;
• Before you start looking you read a stack of guides — how to tell a good apartment from a bad one, how to spot a shady agent, what to watch for in the lease — and reading them makes almost no difference;
• If you are unlucky enough to land in a subletter's group rental, it is like walking into a haunted house;
• If you become the subletter, you finally rent a whole apartment, and showing it to a few candidates already wears you out, leaving no time for your actual job;
• You only want a single room, but agents have nothing but whole apartments, so you scroll through Douban's renting groups from page one to page twenty;
• As a man, you see roommate posts on Douban marked with three big red exclamation points — "women only" — and the discrimination hits you in the face;
• You are bad at bargaining, so every talk with the landlord about rent or repair costs is an ordeal;
• You finally move in, and on day one the water heater fails, the gas stove won't light, or the washing machine quits with a shriek three minutes into a cycle;

……

It is the first all-round punch in the face that working life lands on you.

Search "renting" on Zhihu and on Quora and you will find that most of the Quora answers point to the economics of "which is the better deal, renting or buying." On Zhihu the questions circle around "how to avoid getting scammed when renting / how to tell a real landlord from an agent," "what is it like to get a bizarre roommate," and "how to fix up a rental so you can live better." You can feel the hardship in the titles alone.

Property developers, brokerages, interior designers, home-services companies, even social platforms all want to win young people's hearts (and money) by solving these pains. The flagship product Chinese companies big and small bring to this business is usually called an "apartment." The form started in Europe and the United States, and in service and marketing these "apartments" stress a uniform, high-quality décor, shared facilities and a sense of community, plus an overall experience that is mobile and convenient. QDaily has reported before on the many traditional companies that have entered the business too.

All of these attempts can be read as an effort to attract young people, but no brand has reached scale yet, and the problems people run into while renting do not all appear to have been solved.

Are these apparent "innovations" a real attempt to meet user needs, an eye-catching gimmick, or a wishful misreading of what young people want?

Drawing on its earlier surveys about community, home life and living arrangements more broadly, the QDaily Research Lab has tried to set out, item by item, what young people care about most in renting and everything around it. We are not in the business of solving these problems, but we are in the business of pointing them out.

If we missed anything, tell us!

Most of renting's blood-and-tears moments come from a lack of standardized service — and "standardization" is exactly what long-term rental apartments and the other new rental services are selling

Young people care about their quality of life and are less and less willing to make do just because they haven't bought an apartment. Data in 2016 First-Half Rental Market Report, published by the classifieds site 58.com, shows that people born in the 1990s have overtaken those born in the 1980s as the main group of tenants, and that they care more about transit and about the quality of the place they live in. In an earlier QDaily story we summed up these changes as "consumption upgrading in renting." Beyond location and price, which have always mattered, young tenants who moved to big cities for work care more about the apartment itself and the neighborhood around it, and about the whole experience — finding the place, moving in, living there, moving out.

That is why new rental services attract young people, and why they are willing to pay more for them.

An earlier QDaily Research Lab survey also found that young people have a degree of "chain dependence": they trust big chain brands more because a chain implies a standard you can predict. Many of today's commercial apartment brands look like an answer to the lack of standardization. Going digital has not produced the best service, but it has at least produced a service that appears to cut uncertainty:

1. Young people want to settle as much as possible with a phone. In renting, that runs from picking a room and paying the rent to getting the deposit back at the end;

2. What is on the phone should match reality as closely as possible — for instance, seeing in real time, before setting out, which units are still free, exactly where they are, and when you can move in;

3. No direct contact with a landlord; no need to know who the landlord is or what kind of person they are. They will not knock on your door every few days to check whether you have broken their microwave;

4. Renting only the single room you need, without spending time finding roommates yourself, and trusting that whoever the roommates turn out to be will not be too bad;

5. More trust in "clearly marked prices";

6. When something breaks, there is customer service to call — a more familiar presence than a landlord;

7. A need for "one-stop service," from cleaning to moving.

For now, though, the quality of life after you move in still depends on luck and on who you know

We have pointed out problems with these new rental services in earlier reporting, and in a QDaily Research Lab survey on "the renting or buying experiences you were unhappy with," the biggest complaint was "false information" — what you are shown does not match what is there. Current services have solved only part of that. Much of the trouble young people go to when renting, and much of how they spend, exists to deal with this uncertainty. And in the new rental services, even though a young tenant can see plenty of information on a phone, what you see is not always what you get.

1. The main worry in renting has to do with "not knowing who you will end up with." A big problem with shared-apartment brands is that a tenant cannot know what the future roommates will be like, especially when a unit is rented out room by room, and nobody is comfortable being the first person to move into an apartment.

2. Renovated units from the various apartment brands look good, but whether they were left empty long enough for the renovation smell to clear is a persistent worry.

3. Not everything can be settled by phone the way it first looks. With repairs and cleaning, the customer-service rep on the other end cannot always get things arranged.

4. Some people treat these internet-run apartments as the easy first stop when they move to a new city, planning to move somewhere with better value later, once they have more time and more contacts. (This also explains something we noted in earlier reporting: these apartment brands have low vacancy rates but high turnover.)

5. Next to standardized service, some information still travels only by word of mouth. A reliable moving crew, for instance, tends to move everyone in a circle of friends one after another.

6. When young people need to "find a roommate," "sublet," or "find a room," they turn to Douban rather than to real-estate agents or today's apartment services. (Search "Beijing renting" on Douban and the largest group has 590,000 members; the largest "Shanghai renting" group has 320,000.)

So can "social space" win them over? What young people want first from a neighborhood is safety and convenience

Home is treated as the place to rest and live outside work, and our earlier reporting found that the new long-term rental apartment brands like to stress their "social space and lifestyle" identity, some even claiming to screen tenants by age or education. But in a QDaily Research Lab survey on what real rest is, the answers with the most votes were "sleeping until I wake up on my own" (1,564 votes) and "not seeing a single friend all weekend — watching movies and walking around alone is the only thing that relaxes me" (697 votes). Apartments built around socializing start to look beside the point.

1. What makes a neighborhood worth living in? Young people's standard fits in one line: ideally you could stay inside the compound for a month without your quality of life dropping.

2. The convenience store is one of the things that most decides a young person's quality of life. In the QDaily Research Lab survey "which amenities should a neighborhood have as standard?", the answer with the most votes was "an all-purpose 7-Eleven like the ones in Taiwan or Japan." A convenience store's biggest draw is that it is open 24 hours, sells hot food, and serves you the same way every time. In "what kind of neighborhood makes you feel safe?", the top answer was much the same: "a 24-hour convenience store nearby, the kind that sells hot food."

3. How you get your parcels also shapes daily life more than you would think. In "what small, real annoyances have you hit in city life?", the most annoying was "send a package home and worry nobody's there; send it to the office and worry it arrives on the weekend." In the survey on standard neighborhood amenities, the second most-voted need was self-service parcel lockers.

4. Which everyday public spaces do young people need most? The two with the most support were a healthy breakfast place that can take the morning rush, and a well-equipped gym at a reasonable price.

5. Young people may move out of a place without ever learning who their neighbors were, but they strongly agree that a safe neighborhood needs "security guards and gatekeepers who recognize every resident."

6. A neighborhood that feels safe also has to meet this standard: "no matter how late you get home, the streetlights are on."

7. They do not necessarily want a so-called "community of young residents only." In the survey on which neighborhoods feel safe, most agreed with "the people out in the square are mostly old people and children, and most residents have lived there a long time."

8. What bothers people most about living far out is not the long commute or the trouble of meeting friends. It is "barely any choice when you order food delivery."

So, as noted above, the new services led by long-term rental apartments are not, in young people's eyes, the best value for the money. Beyond that, here is what else we found about how young people pick a place to live and how they live in a rented apartment:

They want to live comfortably, but finding an apartment is mostly a matter of cutting things out

1. Without much experience of living alone, you may once have rented an old apartment that "looked fine at first glance," found all kinds of problems you never imagined after moving in, and regretted it endlessly.

2. "Close to the office, short commute, a bit more sleep in the morning" is a big reason people make the wrong call and rent a run-down old apartment.

3. Young people with higher standards for how they live usually talk themselves into "living far is fine as long as it's near a subway station; far from the office is fine as long as I don't have to change lines." Data says 80% of people hope for a commute under half an hour, while most people's actual commute runs longer than that (@58.com).

4. Rental apartments come with all sorts of bad layouts: a huge living room and a tiny bedroom, or a balcony folded into the bedroom. Next to the other traps of apartment hunting, though, these are not the main worry.

5. As long as sunlight gets in, which way a room faces — something their parents' generation cares about deeply — can be pushed down the list for now, which often draws questions like "why would you rent a west-facing room?"

6. Because moving is such a nuisance and a new apartment may bring new problems, people will put up with their current home and current quality of life a while longer. (In the QDaily Research Lab survey "how did you make do this year?", one of the top answers was "the landlord raised the rent and I don't have the money to move, so I'm making do.")

7. "Empty-nest youth" — young people living alone — often go back and forth on whether to live by themselves, wanting the solitude and worrying that nobody will be around to look after them. The data, though, shows that in China's main first-tier cities the unit in shortest supply is still the one-bedroom. (@58.com)

As for makeovers like "turn a rental into a home for 3,000 yuan" — the will is there, the means are not

1. In a QDaily Research Lab survey called "which how-to guides do you know perfectly well you'll only look at and never do?", "build a stylish rental for 3,000 yuan" came fourth. Young people want to live better, but practical considerations push them to balance "easy" against "good."

2. Do the arithmetic and it is cheaper to rent a cheap old apartment and renovate it thoroughly. The realistic choice is to pay a bit more for a place that is already done up, which avoids the risk of the landlord throwing you out right after you finish the work, and lets you move in quickly.

3. More than "Greek Mediterranean style," "American style" or "all-new furniture," what people care about is whether the formaldehyde in the room is over the limit.

4. People end up with a collection of bookmarked designer furniture, and then the landlord refuses to let them throw out the hideous 1990s-taste furniture that is already there. Searching for furniture, home goods and renovation tips turns into window shopping.

5. The rugs, appliances and ornaments they like, they dare not buy, dreading the pain of the next move; and if they do buy something, they dare not throw away the box for anything large, figuring it will come in handy when they move again.

6. In "what are the pains of being a hoarder?", we found that the clutter causing people the most trouble was magazines and packaging boxes.

7. People long to declutter, but most of the time moving is the only thing that actually makes them throw things away.

8. Most plants, ornaments, cookware and small kitchen appliances get bought right after moving into a new place, at the ambitious start of a new chapter.

9. The moment to fix up a rental is not necessarily before moving in or right after. Young people often overestimate both their own patience and the quality of the room, and only start looking into a makeover after living there a while and finding they can no longer stand the existing décor. (@Zhufaner)

10. What about young people who are short of money but happy to tinker? Rather than one-stop furnishing services, they would sooner browse secondhand sites and flea markets, and they are willing to spend the time and effort to find the best value. (@Zhufaner)

11. And finally, if the technology could deliver, here is what they really want "internet thinking" to solve:

Cover image and illustrations by Lin Xiaoyao

The QDaily Research Lab is a survey column of QDaily, an interactive platform for exploring all kinds of questions about how we live. It may take on a shift or a trend in the way people live, or on one brand's service. Here you can vote, vent, and say where you stand.