Property giants enter the robotics arena

Author | Zhou Zhiyu

Editor | Zhang Xiaoling

In the late-night residential building corridor, a robot is silently cleaning the floor. It can autonomously call the elevator, operate across floors, intelligently identify and avoid delivery boxes, bicycles, and even pets that residents have carelessly placed, and can automatically recognize and speed up the recovery of water on the ground during the "returning to the south" weather in southern China.

This robot is not from robot companies like Ecovacs or Yunji, but is independently developed by a property management company.

On October 21, Wall Street Insight learned that property giant CG SERVICES is accelerating the large-scale implementation of its independently developed "Zero Resident" cleaning robot.

As of October 20 this year, this robot has been put into use in over 130 units across 17 projects in cities such as Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai. According to CG SERVICES' plans, this number will exceed 1,000 by the end of the year.

Xu Binhua, president of CG SERVICES, told Wall Street Insight that this is not only a technological iteration and upgrade but also a strategic pivot for building the company's core competitiveness, and the company will firmly continue to invest in this direction.

Real estate and robots are almost a natural pair. Residential communities, shopping malls, and office buildings are the most ideal and largest application scenarios for robots.

Zhao Xiaoguang, chief technology officer of CG SERVICES, admitted to Wall Street Insight that the reason for "independent research and development" is that general-purpose robots cannot solve the real pain points of property management scenarios.

What is imaginative is that CG SERVICES, as the largest property company in China, has a vast managed area that becomes the most ideal testing ground and incubator for robot applications. In the first half of 2025, CG SERVICES' managed area will reach 1.063 billion square meters, a year-on-year increase of 5.7%.

This scale advantage allows it to generate massive data that other robot companies find difficult to achieve. Zhao Xiaoguang pointed out that the vast service scenarios provide rich spatial data, obstacle information, and garbage information, which are crucial for training AI models, making the products more attuned to property management.

The "self-research and self-use" model also allows CG SERVICES to jump out of the perspective of a technology supplier from the very beginning.

Internally, robots are an important lever for cost reduction and efficiency enhancement. One of CG SERVICES' core strategies this year is to promote digital operations, transforming the traditional property operation process from a "black box" to a "white box." Robots are the core lever for achieving this new paradigm.

In Guangzhou's Yingxi Garden, this new paradigm has been validated in practice. In this improvement-oriented community that pursues "efficient service + quality environment," the traditional model requires 7 cleaners for 7 buildings. However, in the "human-machine collaboration" model, the same 7 buildings only need 5 cleaners, 4 robots, and 7 workstations.

The operational process is thus completely reshaped: robots serve as efficient executors, responsible for high-intensity labor such as corridor cleaning, allowing humans to rest while machines do not; while cleaners transform into managers, responsible for robot scheduling, special stain treatment, and quality sampling, redirecting their energy to other cleaning tasks and providing more refined services The most direct result of this transformation is the reshaping of the role of cleaners, from manual laborers to technical talents, significantly enhancing their professional identity.

Cost reduction and efficiency improvement are just the beginning. In the future, the robotics business is expected to be developed by CG SERVICES into a new growth pole.

As the real estate industry shifts its focus from "development - sales" to "operation - service," robots become the core tools for enhancing user experience and reshaping asset value. Through intelligent services that combine human and machine collaboration, property management companies can transition from cost centers to value centers.

According to research by CG SERVICES, after the introduction of robots at Yingxi Garden, the average satisfaction rate for cleaning in the project increased by a full 8 percentage points. This is the new value brought by robots: technological premiums support service quality and enhance customer stickiness.

If robots can be further promoted in the property management industry, a market worth hundreds of billions will open up.

The management of CG SERVICES pointed out that there is currently a demand for 30,000 units within CG SERVICES itself, and if promoted within the industry, the demand could approach one million units, with the entire market scale reaching hundreds of billions. Moreover, this is just for the niche scenario of corridor cleaning; there are many more scenarios to explore within communities.

Sources close to the management revealed that several domestic and foreign property companies have already expressed interest in collaborating on cleaning robots, with expectations to supply a certain scale of robots next year.

The current real estate industry is being reshaped by technology.

In the robotics sector, CG SERVICES is not the only player. For instance, Vanke's subsidiary, Vanke Logistics, is exploring "rail transit + robot delivery"; China State Construction Engineering Corporation's subsidiary, China State Construction Technology, has developed 3D mapping robots, rebar tying robots, and more, promoting the integration of prefabricated buildings and intelligent construction.

It is hard to imagine that just a few years ago, real estate giants, who relied on scale to win, would so decisively dive into robot research and development. Back then, they were keen on land grabbing, financing, and building.

Xu Binhua firmly believes that the wave of artificial intelligence will fundamentally impact traditional industries like property management.

As tides rise and fall, the actions of giants reflect the rise and fall of the industry. The shift from extensive growth relying on demographic dividends to high-quality development relying on technological dividends has become the inevitable direction for the real estate industry to date.

The so-called "high-quality development" no longer pursues scale and speed but shifts towards quality and efficiency; it represents a deep transformation of the industry from "development - sales" to "development - service - operation"; it is a complete reconstruction of the traditional labor-intensive model using new productive forces such as robots, AI, and the Internet of Things.

From this perspective, CG SERVICES' decisive investment in the robotics sector is not only to address the current labor crisis but also to explore the future shape of the entire real estate industry.

This profound transformation, from concrete to code, from human wave tactics to robot clusters, is not only a survival battle for the giants but also an inevitable path for the entire industry to move towards a new stage of refinement, intelligence, and sustainable development Risk Warning and Disclaimer

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