Property giants enter the robotics sector
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Author | Zhou Zhiyu
Editor | Zhang Xiaoling
In the residential corridor late at night, a robot is silently cleaning the floor. It can independently call the elevator and work across floors, intelligently recognize and avoid parcel boxes, bicycles, or even pets left by owners, and can automatically detect and quickly clean up water accumulation during the humid southern “return of dampness” weather.
This robot is not from robot companies such as Ecovacs or Yunji, but is independently developed by a property management company itself.
Wallstreetcn learned on October 21 that property giant Country Garden Services is accelerating the large-scale implementation of its self-developed "Resident Zero" cleaning robot.
As of October 20 this year, more than 130 of these robots have already been deployed at 17 projects in Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai and other cities. According to Country Garden Services’ plan, this number is expected to exceed 1,000 within the year.
Country Garden Services President Xu Binhuai told Wallstreetcn that this is not only a technological iteration, but also a strategic fulcrum for building core enterprise competitiveness. The company will resolutely continue investing 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.
Country Garden Services CTO Zhao Xiaoguang admitted to Wallstreetcn that the reason for “independent R&D” is because general-purpose robots cannot address the real pain points in property management scenarios.
Intriguingly, as the country’s largest property company, Country Garden Services’ vast managed area has become the most ideal testing ground and incubator for robot applications. In the first half of 2025, Country Garden Services’ managed area is 1.063 billion square meters, up 5.7% year-on-year.
This scale advantage enables the company to generate massive data sets that other robot companies can hardly match. Zhao Xiaoguang pointed out that the vast service scenarios provide abundant spatial data, information on obstacles, and waste, which is crucial for training AI models and making the products more attuned to property management.
The "self-developed and self-used" model also allows Country Garden Services to move beyond the perspective of a technology supplier right from the start.
Internally, robots are an important tool for reducing costs and increasing efficiency. One of the core strategies for Country Garden Services this year is to promote digital operations and turn the traditional property management process from a "black box" into a "white box." Robots are the core tool for realizing this new paradigm.
In Yingxi Garden, Guangzhou, this new paradigm has been tested in practice. In this improvement-oriented community that pursues "efficient service + high-quality environment," the traditional model required 7 cleaners for 7 buildings. Under the "human-machine collaboration" model, the same 7 buildings only require 5 cleaners, 4 robots, and 7 workstations.
This completely reshapes the work process: robots, as efficient executors, are responsible for intensive labor such as corridor cleaning, allowing non-stop operation; cleaners transform into managers, responsible for robot dispatching, handling special stains, and quality inspections, focusing on other cleaning tasks and providing more refined services.
The most direct result of this transformation is that the role of cleaners has been reshaped, turning them from manual laborers into technical talents, greatly enhancing their professional sense of identity.
Cost reduction and efficiency improvement is just the beginning. In the future, the robotics business is expected to become a new growth engine for Country Garden Services.
As the real estate industry shifts its focus from “development-sales” to “operation-service,” robots are the core tool for enhancing user experience and reshaping asset value. Through intelligent human-machine collaborative services, property management companies can transform from cost centers into value centers.
According to Country Garden Services' research, in Yingxi Garden, after robots were introduced, the average cleaning satisfaction score in the project increased by 8 percentage points. This is the new value brought by robots: technology 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 Country Garden Services points out that the company alone currently needs 30,000 robots. If promoted across the industry, the demand could reach nearly one million units, and the total market size would hit hundreds of billions. Moreover, this is just the single sub-scenario of corridor cleaning; there are still more scenarios in communities to be explored.
People close to management revealed that multiple domestic and overseas property companies have already expressed interest in cooperating on cleaning robots, and a certain scale of robots is expected to be supplied externally next year.
Today’s real estate industry is being reshaped by technology.
On the robotics track, Country Garden Services is not the only player. For example, Vanke’s subsidiary Wanwei Logistics is exploring “rail transit + robot delivery”; China State Construction’s China Construction Technology has developed 3D mapping robots, rebar cage tying robots, etc., promoting the integration of prefab construction and intelligent building.
It’s hard to imagine that just a few years ago, real estate giants who competed on scale would now decisively engage in R&D for robotics. Back then, they were passionate about land acquisition, financing, and building construction.
Xu Binhuai firmly believes that the wave of artificial intelligence will definitely have a fundamental impact on traditional industries such as property management.
The rise and fall of the industry is reflected in the actions of these giants. From rough, population-driven growth to high-quality, technology-driven development, this has become the inevitable path of the real estate industry to date.
The so-called “high-quality development” is no longer about pursuing scale and speed, but about quality and efficiency; it is the industry's deep transition from “development-sales” to “development-service-operation”; it is about using new productivity such as robots, AI, and IoT to completely reshape the traditional labor-intensive model.
From this perspective, Country Garden Services’ resolute investment in the robotics field is not just about solving the immediate labor crisis, but also paving the way for the future of the entire real estate industry.
This profound transformation—from concrete to code, from manpower tactics to robot clusters—is not just a survival battle for the giants, but also the only way for the entire industry to move towards a new stage of meticulousness, intelligence, and sustainable development.
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