2014 Founded
Iwujiwu was a Chinese online property listings platform for rental and secondary market listing.
Within a span of 18 months, it raised US$300M in 5 funding exercises. In 2017 its valuation was put at US$1B and became known as the fatest growing unicorn in the industry.
It is not known how much Temasek sank into this company.
Iwujiwu is an O2O app (Online-to-offline) that funnels customers to real estate agents. Opened in 2014 it quickly gained 28 percent market share of Shanghai's rental market. The following year, it leased out more than 20,000 homes and rung up US$5.9 billion trade volume. By 2016/2017 competitive business models profilerated, real estate agent-customer monkey dealings, and broader market cooled and macroeconomic uncertainties increased. Investors' cash burnt and the company cut commissions making the situation worst. Within 4 years it had gone from unicorn to bankruptcy.
Weak model : When people make their biggest financial investment in their life time, the process requires significant services, trust, and face-to-face interactions. In addition, as people don’t buy homes very often – unlike the so called high-frequency food takeout or stock trading services, for example – the classic Internet business strategy of user acquisition and value generation did not work well neither.
It seems AIWUJIWU was simply an app. Shanghai Manyi Property Consultancy is the entity that operates the app. Official record shows Deng Wei its founder has backed out as an investor and the company has changed its legal representative from Mei Hong to Zhai Guanmin. Its website has been taken over by a rental agent app called First Floor Landlor. Den Wei is gone and the company nameplate no longer hangs at its former address.
This is a classic case of greed dampening investor prudency. It's the mentality of "Anything-technology-and-China-I-also-want".
INVESTMENT ALERT: There has been no official announcement, but it's already game over. We don't know if Temasek has written this off yet.
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