ONEWO breaks the deadlock in the second half of property management

Author | Zhou Zhiyu

Editor | Huang Yu

China's property industry is undergoing reconstruction.

In the past, property companies primarily relied on real estate developers for growth. As the real estate market enters an adjustment period, this business model, which is dependent on parent companies, has become increasingly unsustainable, leading the entire property industry to face severe operational pressures.

The data from ONEWO's mid-2025 financial report clearly demonstrates a turning point in the industry. The company's core net profit increased by 10.8% year-on-year, far exceeding revenue growth. Behind this is a fundamental change in the business structure: the proportion of related business from developers has dropped to 6.5%, while the proportion of independently acquired cyclical business is close to 90%.

Wang Xubin, the financial head of ONEWO, stated that the data from the mid-term report indicates a positive divergence is basically being achieved. He pointed out that based on the mid-term report data, the growth rates of revenue and core net profit are expected to further expand throughout 2025.

This indicates that leading property companies are fundamentally changing their business models to adapt to the new market environment. As ONEWO Chairman Zhu Baoquan said, "Whether one can quickly find their own path to independent development is the most important point in the past three years." This is not a simple transformation, but a complete reconstruction of the underlying logic of the industry.

The "flexible pricing" launched by ONEWO is truly revolutionary, not in the fluctuation of prices, but in its attempt to re-sign contracts. It bypasses the historical intermediary of developers and seeks to establish a direct and transparent relationship of rights and responsibilities between property companies and owners.

He Shuhua, Chief Operating Officer of ONEWO, summarized the core of this transformation into three points: moving from "counting heads" to "calculating workload," providing standards for negotiation, and making services quantifiable. These three points essentially do the same thing: they completely open up the black box that was previously packaged as property fees, clearly displaying every component inside to the other party of the contract—the owners.

This is a bold move. It means that property companies are abandoning the ambiguous profit margins brought by information asymmetry and placing themselves under the scrutiny of the owners.

In the Chongqing Hanlin Academy project, the government set a price limit of 1.9 yuan, while the owners expected 1.3 yuan, but the final price was set at 2.28 yuan, receiving nearly 100% approval from the owners.

"We believe that flexible pricing... creates a dynamic balance regarding pricing among owners, property companies, and the government," He Shuhua emphasized. This marks a shift for property companies from being passive price acceptors to active value negotiators, which is the first and most solid cornerstone of independent development.

A deeper revolution is occurring in the reconstruction of efficiency regarding "people." After visiting several robotics companies, Zhu Baoquan concluded that "90% machines and 10% human labor" is the way forward. When a robot can complete 90% of security patrols, 90% of cleaning, and 90% of inspections, the remaining 10% of "finishing work" will give rise to a brand new position—"mixed worker."

This means that the traditional pyramid organizational structure of property companies based on specialized divisions will be completely dismantled. Future frontline property employees will no longer be single-skilled cogs but technical workers with multiple finishing abilities who can efficiently collaborate with machines This will be disruptive to the entire industry's employment standards, training systems, and compensation structures. In the first half of the year, ONEWO's management fee expenditure net decreased by nearly 80 million yuan. Behind this is the deployment of financial AI "Caiyun Xianzi" and HR assistant "Nezha" and other intelligent agents.

Zhu Baoquan emphasized that this must be a "triple win" situation: the company improves efficiency, the results of the efficiency improvement should be passed on to customers, and employees find new development directions through job transfer training. In the first half of the year, more than 685 employees at ONEWO completed job transfers.

The past dilemma of the property industry lies in its value creation being firmly locked within the "community walls." When the profits of the main business are thinner than paper, all companies begin to compete on the narrow bridge of "value-added services," but their imagination is often limited to shallow services such as housekeeping and group buying.

ONEWO's exploration lies in breaking this invisible wall, transitioning from a community service provider to a broader "asset service provider" and "urban service provider."

ONEWO's layout clearly demonstrates this trajectory. Wang Xubin revealed that future investments will mainly focus on three areas: selective mergers and acquisitions in butterfly cities, benchmark projects for community business transformation, and deepening technological investment.

At the second headquarters in Wuhan, the shared center has already begun providing remote outsourcing services for finance, HR, and even IT to large enterprises such as Tencent and China FAW. Energy management, this brand new high value-added track, has also been established as a core competitiveness.

Even in dealing with the tricky issue of heavy assets left by the parent company, ONEWO has demonstrated its professional capability in asset operation. ONEWO's Deputy General Manager Ye Fei introduced that the company has established a special working group named "Jingzhe," symbolizing "rebirth and breaking ground."

Its strategy is clear and pragmatic: for sales-type assets, sell as much as possible under the principle of "overall profit and loss ≥ 0"; for operational assets, focus on "refined operation." The Wuhan New Tang project achieved significant results with a mere investment of 5 million yuan in micro-transformation, resulting in a 26% increase in foot traffic and a 31% increase in sales.

Whether in corporate services, energy management, or asset operation, the essence is to escape the single, low-margin revenue model of property fees. By productizing and externalizing its accumulated capabilities, ONEWO is entering a broader and more profitable market.

This crisis in the property industry is a brutal "stress test." It is filtering out two types of companies: the "old property" that remains in its old identity, and the "new species" that actively deconstructs and reshapes itself.

From rebuilding contracts to redefining people, and then to reshaping boundaries, the old "property manager" identity, which was dependent, vague, and labor-intensive, is being terminated; while an independent, transparent, and technology-driven asset service operator is being born. This may be the ultimate fate of property management