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Nov. 3 (NBD) -- Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba Group and JD.com are leveraging on their huge customer base and mighty online presence to offer property related services. 

Each of them has hundreds of millions of visitors daily, valuable asset to all real estate companies, Lai Qin, a researcher from E-house China R&D Institute, said to NBD in an interview.

In October, Alibaba's payment system unit Alipay launched credit-based house rental services featuring zero guarantee deposit and pay by the month in Beijing, Shanghai, and six other Chinese cities.

Moreover, the behemoth's Taobao.com has a O2O platform, jiyoujia.com, which offers one-stop home decoration services and has covered properties in 97 cities.

Alibaba's old rival JD.com has also added a real estate section to its APP.

The section is designed to provide house purchasing services in 22 cities across China. With three options available - common residence, villa, and commercial workspace, it has established partnerships with 82 developers and 35 service providers, according to JD.com.

However, their operating models are vastly different from that of traditional real estate developers.

What Alibaba and JD.com do is more like building a platform among developers, house buyers, landlords, and tenets to significantly facilitate their communication and reduce their time and other costs by leveraging technical means like big data and artificial intelligence, Lai told NBD.

Several industry insiders echoed Lai's viewpoint, saying that e-commerce companies are just bringing their user flow to the real estate sector and won't compete with developers in the traditional development area.

In the house rental market, Internet giants with a strong presence and massive data indeed enjoy an edge, but their products and services must be of high value, or all their efforts will be in vain, noted Li Xuefeng, assistant director of the Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Email: lansuying@nbd.com.cn