Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the contentious encounters between property listing websites seeking to connect home buyers to sellers directly and real estate brokers, who view themselves as the agents creating the market rather than mere intermediaries, at the urban fringe of Nanjing.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2015, China's biggest property listing website, Soufang, launched an online platform to directly connect home buyers to sellers.Its vision was to eliminate intermediaries, such as brokers, in property transactions and reform the property market with "the utmost transparency and efficiency." The website based its ambition on the claim that brokers inhibited the free flow of information in an otherwise more equitable market. To buyers, it aimed to replace commissions, which had been calculated at varied percentages of the property price and paid to the brokers, with a standardized "assistant fee" payable to the website only if one chose an elective service. In contrast,at the urban fringe of east Nanjing where I conducted twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork, brokers mainly relied on cultivated inter-personal networks to share information of the local property market.For years they had been using property listing websites mainly to draw in new clients to expand their own networks. This paper documents the contentious encounter and negotiation between Soufang, its technology and personnel,and the local brokers.I pay particular attention to how the realtors resist, negotiate, and appropriate Soufang's platform to sustain and transform the market assemblage they are embedded in.