Xiao Li (a pseudonym) is a young renter living in Beijing's Chaoyang district. At 1 AM on May 14, 2026, he was awakened by the smell of something burning and discovered flames coming from the power strip by his bed.
"My mind went completely blank," Xiao Li recalled. "Luckily, the property manager had given me an emergency response card earlier. My first reaction was to cut the power, then I called for help in the WeChat service group." Within seconds, an automatic system alert was triggered. Relevant personnel, including KE Holdings Inc. (BEKE) property managers, were immediately added to a group chat to coordinate a response, providing phone guidance to Xiao Li, reporting the fire, and contacting the property management. All parties arrived on-site within 30 minutes, controlling the fire before the fire department arrived.
Xiao Li was fortunate. But not everyone is so lucky. According to a police report, a residential fire in Zhengzhou, Henan province, at 7:51 AM on July 6, 2026, covered an area of approximately 15 square meters, resulting in five deaths and one injury. Feedback from residents indicated that "most of the tenants in the building were young office workers paying around 1,000 yuan per month in rent, and some property owners had converted their units into hotel-style accommodations."
In China, tens of millions of young people, new urban residents, and the floating population live in rented urban accommodations. For most, signing a contract with a landlord and paying a deposit is considered the end of the "settling in" process. Few take the time to seriously check if gas valves are leaking, if wiring is aged, or if water heater exhaust vents are properly installed. The safety of rental housing has long existed in a concerning "gray area."
The Unprotected Risks of Renting: Gas, Electricity, Fire...
The rental housing sector, which long-term accommodates the living needs of tens of millions of new urbanites and migrant populations, has consistently lacked proper safety governance. Landlords act independently, tenants have weak safety awareness, and intermediaries focus on closing deals rather than after-sales service. Throughout the entire lifecycle of a rental property, from acquisition to tenant turnover, safety inspections are often the most neglected step.
On September 15, 2025, the State Council's "Housing Rental Regulations" officially took effect. For the first time, these regulations legally defined the safety baseline for rental housing, specifying that properties must comply with construction, fire safety, gas, interior decoration, and other relevant regulations and mandatory standards, and must not endanger personal safety or health. Furthermore, they explicitly require housing rental industry organizations to establish sound industry norms and strengthen self-regulation.
To better implement the requirements of the "Housing Rental Regulations" and promote rental standardization, KE Holdings Inc. (BEKE) released the "KE Holdings Safety Standard" (Q/BKHJ 001-2026) on June 22, 2026. This is understood to be the housing rental industry's first systematic corporate standard for residential safety.
By the end of 2025, the number of rental properties under KE Holdings Inc.'s (BEKE) management had exceeded 700,000, with recorded net revenue of 21.9 billion yuan, achieving its first annual profit. At this turning point toward profitability, the company chose to add a "safety lock" to its operations.
The rationale behind this decision was not a single incident or statistic, but a judgment formed through long-term risk management and the combined effect of multiple pressures. First was the responsibility pressure stemming from scale. With 700,000 properties and millions of tenants, any accident involves life and property, triggers potentially irrecoverable losses, and could deal a devastating blow to brand reputation. "The larger the scale, the more we cannot afford an incident" is a frequently mentioned internal assessment at KE Holdings Inc. (BEKE).
A deeper motivation came from frontline service feedback—the platform had repeatedly received tenant reports about gas odors and electrical faults. The handling of some dangerous situations made the entire team realize that rental safety is the bottom line of asset management services.
Blocking 25,000 Problematic Properties
Safety cannot rely on luck; a prevention and control system must be built. To outsiders, the release of the new standard seemed rushed, taking less than six months from preparation and drafting in January 2026 to completion, soliciting feedback, internal review, and release.
However, the safety management head at KE Holdings Inc. (BEKE) emphasized that the company's consideration and groundwork for safety began long before the official project launch. In fact, since early 2025, KE Holdings Inc. (BEKE) had begun systematically investing in safety governance.
According to the safety management head for KE Holdings Inc.'s (BEKE) "Worry-Free Rental" service, as of June 2026, the service had conducted safety inspections and repairs on 567,000 newly acquired properties and performed regular inspections on over 337,000 properties during tenancies.
Currently, a gas inspection for a Worry-Free Rental property covers about 40 points, and an electrical inspection covers about 20 points, with an average inspection time of 35 to 40 minutes. Property managers must individually check key areas such as gas pipe connections, valves, water heater exhaust vents, wiring circuits, and sockets/switches. For every newly acquired property before it is rented out, Worry-Free Rental managers check for electrical leakage risks.
567,000 newly acquired properties mean over 20 million gas points needed individual checking—a massive undertaking. Since initiating systematic safety governance in early 2025, KE Holdings Inc.'s (BEKE) Worry-Free Rental service has screened out and excluded over 25,000 properties that failed to meet safety entry requirements.
These filtered-out "dangerous houses" primarily had issues with aging gas facilities and unauthorized, haphazard electrical wiring. For these "problem properties" prohibited from external rental, KE Holdings Inc.'s (BEKE) Worry-Free Rental service notifies the property owners or relevant departments of the safety hazards, providing necessary risk warnings.
The "Physical Exam" Race Against Danger
Indeed, effectively inspecting hundreds of thousands of properties is a challenge in itself. One case during risk inspections left a deep impression on the KE Holdings Inc. (BEKE) team. According to safety standards, a gas water heater's exhaust pipe must extend completely outdoors. However, during actual inspections, many exhaust pipes run through suspended ceilings to the outside. The condition of the pipe inside the ceiling is not directly visible and is not a mandatory inspection point every time.
Yet, during a routine inspection, one property manager noticed a loose exhaust pipe outside the ceiling and proactively opened an inspection panel. This "extra look" revealed a major hazard: a large break in the exhaust pipe inside the ceiling. This meant exhaust fumes could not fully vent outside; incomplete combustion could lead to carbon monoxide dispersing directly indoors, with potentially dire consequences.
"Every safety inspection is a race against danger. We must stay vigilant and not overlook any detail," the head of the department stated. From discovery to resolution, the property manager quickly submitted a maintenance work order. The property was only listed for external marketing and rental after the follow-up rectification was completed.
However, human judgment is always variable. A property manager's sense of responsibility and experience directly impacts inspection quality. Could checking 40 gas points become a mere formality of ticking boxes? To address this, KE Holdings Inc. (BEKE) established "three lines of defense": The first is standardized procedures, clearly defining inspection items, checkpoints, and acceptance requirements. The second is digital traceability, enabling full-process tracking. The third is a separate process quality check and third-party evaluation mechanism, using online and offline verification to validate execution quality.
"The biggest fear in safety management is formalism," the head said. "From property entry, acquisition inspection, to handover re-inspection and mid-tenancy inspections, we aim to ensure safety requirements are truly implemented through a combination of systems, technology, and supervision, rather than relying on individual conscientiousness."
Technology and Rigorous Measures in Crisis Response
In crisis response and prevention, AI applications play a key role. The swift control of the fire in Xiao Li's case on May 14, 2026, was supported by an AI risk identification system in operation. An automatic safety risk event identification function deployed in service groups can intelligently recognize risk signals related to personal safety, fire hazards, gas leaks, etc., based on tenant feedback, triggering immediate work orders and tiered responses.
Simultaneously, KE Holdings Inc. (BEKE) continues to explore AI and big data applications, using risk data accumulation and analysis to identify high-risk scenarios and common issues, providing support for safety decision-making and targeted governance.
Nevertheless, technology has its limits. KE Holdings Inc.'s (BEKE) safety management head admitted, "Currently, many concealed and complex issues are difficult for technology to fully identify. For example, aging gas pipes, unauthorized renovations, and non-standard equipment installation often require professional detection, manual in-home inspections, and expert comprehensive judgment."
This also means that the absolute "rigorous measure" in safety governance must focus on "safety reach." "It's not just about personnel reach, but also the reach of risk prevention capabilities and safety awareness," stated the safety head for KE Holdings Inc.'s (BEKE) rental business.
Indeed, with 700,000 properties corresponding to a million-level tenant base, can safety notifications reach every tenant? Is property manager training adequate? Is emergency response fast enough? The answers to these questions determine the practical implementation of safety standards on the tenant side.
This requires more meticulous service: The first layer is proactive visits, such as mandatory gas safety inspections at least once a year. The second layer is attaching safety checks to every maintenance visit. The third layer is making safety reminders continuously visible—adding visual safety prompts at key locations like range hoods, electrical panels, and bathroom heaters, and pushing safety reminders through service groups during specific periods.
Of course, rental safety governance is not the responsibility of a single company; collaboration is crucial. In Tianjin, KE Holdings Inc. (BEKE) and Jinran China Resources Gas have established a multi-party joint inspection mechanism: the two parties cooperate to arrange at least two gas inspections annually. By establishing a linkage process of "inspection discovery → risk list feedback → targeted hazard remediation," they aim to achieve same-day rectification of gas hazards. Additionally, they are exploring a closed-loop system of "alarm + insurance + emergency safety," planning to install 6,000 sets of alarms annually.
The Challenge of "Greater Safety"
China's housing rental market has long been characterized as "small-scale, fragmented, and disorderly," with individual landlords, secondary landlords, and small agencies occupying the vast majority of the market share. While KE Holdings Inc.'s (BEKE) 700,000 managed properties and millions of tenants represent a certain scale, they constitute only a very small portion of China's market, which serves 250 million renters.
"As a promoter of standardized renting, the greatest challenge is not technology, but standard unification," said the safety management head for KE Holdings Inc.'s (BEKE) Worry-Free Rental service. "Different cities have varying regulatory requirements, infrastructure, and market environments, but the underlying logic of safety governance is the same. Safety is not something a single company can accomplish independently; it is the shared responsibility of the entire industry."
Operational management challenges are equally real: the binding force of corporate standards needs long-term observation; quality consistency in inspecting hundreds of thousands of properties requires more transparent supervision; the reliability of AI technology needs more practical validation; industry-wide radiation effects depend on market pressure and policy coordination. Particularly when companies face greater profit pressures, whether safety investments will be quietly reduced will be a long-term test of strategic resolve and operational resilience.
In June, during mid-year safety inspections, the emergency response card by tenant Xiao Li's bed was updated. The new card was left by a KE Holdings Inc. (BEKE) Worry-Free Rental property manager during an inspection the previous week. Under the line for "reporting a fire," the manager had handwritten the local property management's duty phone number.
Safety is never something that can be "finished and completed." For a company managing 700,000 properties, every 40-minute inspection of a newly acquired property, every in-home check during a tenancy, and every emergency response card posted by a bed is installing an invisible "safety valve" for rapid growth. And for the young people drifting in the city, so-called "peace of mind renting" might simply mean knowing that when the smell of burning strikes again in the dead of night, they won't have to face it alone and helpless, no longer panicked and worried.
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