Longfor Property Services | How a Market Leader Expanded Downmarket Without Diluting Its Premium Brand

Background & Challenge

Our client is one of China’s Top 10 Property Management Companies by Overall Competitiveness. They came to China Bridge with a very clear ambition.

The company had long been recognized for its professionalism, attentiveness, sophistication, and premium service. As China’s real estate sector increasingly shifted from a product-led model toward a service-driven one, the transformation of the industry over the previous two to three years presented a significant opportunity for the company to accelerate its growth.

However, as a premium property management brand began expanding into the middle-class market, it quickly became clear that the answer was not simply to lower service standards.

Doing so could seriously dilute — or even damage — the brand equity the company had spent years building.

The real challenge was therefore:

How could the company enter the middle-class market without compromising its premium brand, while capturing the once-in-a-generation opportunity created by the service transformation of the real estate industry?

Findings & Insights

For this project, China Bridge worked closely with the client to conduct research across 9 cities and 18 middle-class residential communities.

The team visited 632 homeowners, engaged directly with 100 users, and ultimately defined 4 major service modules, 22 operational scenarios, and 12 user journey maps.

Through this research, five major challenges emerged:

• Service delivery was highly fragmented, involving long processes and multiple departments, making it difficult to develop systematic solutions.
• The organization struggled to proactively provide services tailored to specific customer needs.
• Departments were structured around internal business functions rather than around homeowners.
• Cross-functional collaboration was weak, with teams often operating in isolation, reducing the efficiency of project execution and implementation.
• Service offerings needed to be continuously updated, tested, and innovated as customer expectations evolved.

Process

Based on these research findings and insights, China Bridge designed a targeted service design process and methodology.

The first step was to immerse the client’s cross-functional core team in real customer needs.

Through service design methods, employees were encouraged to shift perspective from an internal business view to a homeowner-centered view, refine customer personas, and develop a more nuanced understanding of the target audience.

Together, China Bridge and the client:

defined the core service value proposition;
identified key service scenarios for middle-class homeowners;
co-created and explored a new philosophy for property management services;
mapped and co-created the property service blueprint;
and translated these findings into clear strategic guidance for the design of frontline employee service manuals.

Based on the research, China Bridge grouped stakeholders into three major categories, with all stakeholder relationships ultimately organized around one central figure:

the homeowner.

The entire housing lifecycle was then systematically mapped from beginning to end.

This enabled the company to understand the homeowner’s complete residential journey from an end-to-end perspective, identify critical opportunity areas throughout that journey, and design services specifically around them.

Building on these insights, China Bridge developed a series of insight synthesis and service standardization workshops.

Together with the client, we explored the living habits and cultural characteristics of middle-class homeowners, identified the core values they expected from property management, and considered both their functional and emotional needs.

From this process, four core service value propositions were defined:

Order. Responsiveness. Warmth. Trust.

These four principles then became the foundation for designing service content and service standards.

Results

The project was delivered over a period of four months.

Within this highly complex property management ecosystem, China Bridge ultimately developed and iterated the Service Design Toolkit 1.0, covering the full process from user research to business translation, together with a clearly defined set of service design tools and methodologies.

The project also produced:

a property service content framework;
service standards;
and a practical service content handbook.

By starting with the needs of middle-class homeowners, the project laid a solid foundation for the future productization of the company’s entire property service system.

Through the insight synthesis and service standardization workshops, the team identified:

4 customer segments
12 residential life scenarios
100 homeowner pain points
56 delight points

These insights were then translated into four service trees, corresponding to four core property management functions.

The roots of each service tree were defined by the values homeowners cared about most, together with the standards they expected across 12 different scenarios, including:

community activities, familiar visitors entering the community, unfamiliar visitors entering the community, home renovation, and other everyday residential situations.

From these roots grew four major property service categories:

Security & Order, Engineering, Cleaning, and Concierge Services.

Each service tree then mapped the operational scenarios associated with everyday homeowner life, such as:

entrance gate management;
surveillance and monitoring;
facility management;
parking garage management;
main community entrances;
primary circulation routes within the residential compound;
and other relevant service touchpoints.

For each scenario, China Bridge identified nine potential approaches to service improvement:

Service standard optimization
Process optimization
Cross-functional collaboration
Using technology to replace repetitive manual work
Facility and infrastructure upgrades
Amplifying existing delight points
Integrating external resources
Exploring new service opportunities
Exploring new revenue models

The resulting Property Service Trees provided, for the first time, a systematic and visual way to map the relationship between different types of homeowners, different living scenarios, and the property services required to support them.

The framework not only made visible the gap between internal property management standards and the standards homeowners actually cared about, but also translated opportunities in user-centered design, cross-functional collaboration, and human–technology collaboration into concrete operational improvements.

More fundamentally, the framework clarified the differences between middle-class homeowners and high-net-worth homeowners, and demonstrated how different customer groups could each be provided with residential experiences that felt comfortable, secure, and appropriate to their needs.

Value

The project did more than create a new service system.

It planted the seeds of genuine user-centered thinking across the client organization.

Employees learned to approach cross-functional collaboration through an entirely different lens.

Team members from operations, marketing, cleaning, engineering, security, process management, community commerce, brand communications, customer service and concierge teams, landscaping, and customer research were encouraged to move beyond the limitations of their individual functions.

Instead, they learned to:

think holistically, collaborate across departments, and co-create around the homeowner experience.

This process helped the organization build a high level of internal alignment.

China Bridge also guided cross-functional employees through the entire service design journey firsthand:

research → synthesis → co-creation → standard development

Rather than learning service design as an abstract methodology, employees experienced the process directly through practice.

This helped the organization shift perspective, build internal innovation capability, and establish processes through which ideas could actually be implemented.

Conclusion

In 2018 and 2019, the client continued to iterate and upgrade the system initially developed together with China Bridge.

The company further standardized and refined its property management manuals and implemented many of the concepts developed during the co-creation process.

Over time, the organization itself evolved toward becoming a technology-enabled property management company, with advanced digital services forming an increasingly important foundation of its operating model.

As the client’s General Manager explained:

“With a comprehensive service standards system and extensive experience in community services already in place, we have continued exploring how digital and information technologies can help facilities and equipment operate more effectively while making everyday life more convenient for homeowners.”

In 2018, the company rose one position in China’s property management industry rankings, delivered strong operating performance, and became recognized as one of the leading players in technology-enabled property management.