Translated Listings Provide Home Data to Chinese Buyers

Moore says this agreement gives his users more than 110,000 new home listings.

AUSTIN, TX—China’s most popular international real estate website, Juwai.com , has signed an in-depth partnership with Austin-based Builders Digital Experience (BDX), provider of digital marketing and sales solutions for American home builders. BDX works with more than 1,000 builder clients across the country and operates the new home listing site, NewHomeSource.com , with 110,000-plus new home listings updated daily. “Our mission is to help builders use the Internet to not only reach buyers but also connect with them. By partnering with Juwai.com and translating new home listings into Chinese, we are tapping into a significant and proven market opportunity giving our clients access to these 1.3 billion potential buyers,” Tim Costello , CEO of Builders Digital Experience says. The BDX partnership will allow Juwai.com to provide its more than 2 million users per month with access to new home listings from single-family new home builders across the nation. For the first time in China, consumers will have access to the same pricing, availability and feature information as US consumers. Every listing will be professionally translated into simplified Chinese. “Some Chinese buyers in the US have a strong preference for new homes, but until today it has been very hard for them to discover or research these listings. Builders Digital Experience is finally making it possible for us to offer them tens of thousands of new homes from as many as 1,000 builders across the country,” says Matthew Moore , Juwai.com’s head of the Americas. In a recent survey conducted by Juwai.com, when asked to rank on a scale of one to 10 how strongly they would consider a new home, Chinese would-be buyers of US real estate gave their highest average ranking, 7.3, to a brand-new home offered by a builder. They ranked an existing home at 5.8 and a custom-built home at 5.05. Moore tells GlobeSt.com: “Our users are always asking us for more inventory of new and existing homes. BDX is so dominant in the US new home market that this agreement gives our users over 110,000 new home listings, which are updated daily. We expect more transactions to result.” In the same survey, Juwai.com asked Chinese buyers for their priorities when buying a home in the United States. Obtaining a safe neighborhood was the top response, with 82% of the total. Convenience was second and named by 63% of the respondents. Other popular priorities were proximity to good schools (57%), an established neighborhood (56%) and quality of construction (50%). The least important factors were the character and uniqueness of the home (12%) and the ability to customize the home (14%). “While most Chinese actually purchase existing homes, there is a strong cultural preference for new homes. When a new home is also located near good schools or other conveniences, it really has an advantage,” says Moore about the results. “New home builders have a product that is very appealing to Chinese buyers, whether they are pure investors or intend to live in the property. The fact that it is new suggests the home will be of a higher quality and in better condition than an existing home that has been lived in. Because three quarters of Chinese buyer inquiries in the USA last year were at least partially related to education, builders should emphasize in their marketing the quality of local schools and proximity to area universities. With domestic buyers, builders spend a lot of effort emphasizing the quality of the homes they build, but with Chinese buyers they need to do just as much to communicate why the community over all is an attractive place to live.”