On the evening of May 5, 2026, just after Han Tao's family dinner, he hurriedly rushed to a real estate agency in Huangpu District, Shanghai to collect two second-hand housing transaction mortgage loan application materials.

As a retail business account manager at the Shanghai branch of a city commercial bank, he found that the Shanghai real estate market has rebounded since March this year, triggering a new round of mortgage loan competition. Many banks in Shanghai see expanding their mortgage loan business as an opportunity to promote the recovery of positive growth in retail business.

In early April, Han Tao received a new task - the second quarter branch mortgage loan allocation needs to increase by 30% compared to the same period last year. This means that as a business backbone, he needs to complete an additional 18 million yuan of mortgage loan business compared to the same period last year. Other banks are also increasing their investment and assessment indicators for mortgage loans in Shanghai, "Han Tao said. In the situation where the interest rates for second-hand housing mortgage loans issued by various banks in Shanghai are almost the same (generally 3.06%), in order to complete new tasks, banks must find new breakthroughs.

Li Jun is a retail business account manager at a local bank branch in Shanghai. Every day, he is calculating how to play the "emotional card" with various real estate agents in the surrounding area, so that they can prioritize handing over mortgage loan business to him. Since April, our services to these real estate agents have been meticulous. From dress code, to delivery time, to loan approval time, everything meets the requirements of real estate agents, "said Li Jun. But he still dare not take it lightly, because other banks are also competing for services, and any negligence in his own services will cause the real estate agent to transfer the mortgage loan business volume to other banks.

Wang Lin and Li Jun work for the same bank and are the heads of the retail business department responsible for mortgage loan business in the branch. He found that in the past two months, there has been a significant increase in banks seeking to cooperate with large local real estate agents.

According to exclusive sources from the Economic Observer, a bank with rapidly growing mortgage loan scale has been required to pay attention to mortgage loan business risks and compliance operations after the May Day holiday.

Assessment Enhancement

Since March, Li Jun has felt significant changes in the mortgage loan business.

At the end of that month, the Shanghai branch of his bank announced in an internal meeting that the mortgage loan business volume of the branch in March had increased by about 15% compared to the third and fourth quarters of last year. This achievement is quite rare, "he said. Affected by the sluggish demand in the Shanghai real estate market, the mortgage loans of Li Jun's branch experienced negative growth last year. However, this situation did not improve significantly in the first two months of this year. The repayment amount of the branch's mortgage loans once exceeded the disbursement amount, resulting in a negative net investment in mortgage loans.

Since March, increasing the investment in mortgage loans has become a new key task for the branch. Especially under the pressure of personal business loans, the rectification of high interest and high return car loan business, and the slowdown in the growth rate of personal consumer loans, if the branch wants to maintain sustained positive growth in retail loan scale, it must seize the opportunity of the rebound in demand for mortgage loans.

Data shows that from March to April, the cumulative transaction volume of second-hand houses in Shanghai was about 59200 units, setting a new record high for the same period in nearly five years. Among them, in April, the cumulative online signing volume of second-hand houses (including commercial) in Shanghai reached 28742 units, a year-on-year increase of 22.3%, setting a new record for the highest single month transaction volume in Shanghai in the past 10 years. During the May Day holiday, 1390 second-hand houses were sold in Shanghai, a year-on-year increase of 15.93%.

Zhang Bo, the head of 58 Anjuke Research Institute, believes that the relaxation policy of the real estate market introduced in Shanghai after the Spring Festival has directly lowered the threshold and cost of purchasing houses, and released the backlog of residents' demand for essential and improved properties. Especially with the relaxation of housing purchase qualifications for new Shanghainese, it has brought a lot of purchasing power to the Shanghai real estate market.

In early April, the leaders of this branch traveled to various branches in Shanghai to specifically supervise the mortgage loan business, requiring each branch to tap into its potential and strive to achieve a year-on-year increase of at least 20% in the branch's mortgage loan investment in the second quarter, which is an increase of about 9 billion yuan compared to the same period last year.

Accompanying it closely is the new assessment index for mortgage loan business of branch retail business customer managers.

Li Jun's preliminary estimate is that under the new assessment indicators, he will complete at least 35 million yuan more mortgage loan transactions than the same period last year.

In order to motivate employees, Li Jun discovered in early April that after each working day, a table would be posted in the internal work column of the branch, detailing the latest mortgage loan incoming volume and mortgage loan disbursement balance ranking of each retail business customer manager in the branch. The branch manager refers to it as an "employee competition", where the top two employees will receive higher job performance ratings and corresponding quarterly performance bonuses will increase; On the contrary, the last two employees will be supervised to improve their work methods. If the performance of mortgage loan business continues to decline, a certain percentage of performance bonus will be deducted.

In early April, the superior branch of the branch launched a "branch competition" activity simultaneously. After each working day, the branch will send the latest mortgage loan processing volume and mortgage loan disbursement balance ranking of each branch to the branch head in Shanghai. The last three branches will face criticism.

Therefore, the head of the branch where Li Jun is located requested all retail business customer managers to "exert their full strength" and not let the branch "lose face", striving to complete the branch's requirement of adding more than 200 million yuan of mortgage loan business in the second quarter by early June.

Competition For Intermediaries

Over the past month, Li Jun has been in close contact with the heads of surrounding real estate agencies, often bringing them milk tea, coffee, or pastries, hoping that they will entrust more mortgage loan business to him. During the May Day holiday, he stayed at a real estate agency for three afternoons under the pretext of delivering coffee to the on duty staff. As soon as he saw a homebuyer preparing to sign a second-hand house purchase contract, he quickly approached to introduce his own bank's mortgage loan products.

Currently, the transaction volume of Shanghai's real estate market has rebounded, mainly concentrated in "old and dilapidated" houses in the urban area and properties outside the outer ring road. But the transaction volume of such houses is generally less than 5 million yuan, and after deducting more than 50% of the down payment ratio (in order to reduce their own repayment burden) and provident fund loans, the amount left for mortgage loans is often less than 1.5 million yuan. Therefore, Li Jun still needs to continue to visit real estate agencies and collect more orders in order to fill the remaining gap of about 16 million yuan in new assessment indicators for mortgage loans before the end of June.

During the process of getting close to real estate agents, Li Jun met several retail business account managers from other banks and shared his experiences in dealing with real estate agents and obtaining more mortgage loan business with each other. Don't look at the surface as friendly, everyone is secretly competing, "Li Jun said. Recently, two real estate agency executives he knew celebrated their birthdays with 6-inch birthday cakes. However, to his surprise, a bank account manager he knew gave these two executives 12 inch birthday cakes.

In the past few years, large real estate agents have held over 80% of the market share in the Shanghai area, controlling a large number of homebuyer customer resources and mortgage loan business volume.

Therefore, Wang Lin's cooperation with these large real estate agents drove the rapid growth of mortgage loan business in March. However, as the Shanghai real estate market continues to recover since March, other banks have followed suit and sought close cooperation with local large real estate agents.

The reporter learned from multiple sources that this cooperation can be described as "each taking what they need". Banks provide cooperation fees such as mortgage loan product promotion and joint marketing to these large real estate intermediaries, in exchange for the latter providing sufficient customer resources and mortgage loan business volume for homebuyers.

The head of a real estate agency store in Shanghai revealed that since March, they have signed cooperation agreements with six bank branches in their jurisdiction, including Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, China Merchants Bank, China CITIC Bank, and China Construction Bank. The latter pays cooperation fees in the name of joint marketing in exchange for providing a certain amount of second-hand housing mortgage loan transactions per month.

Faced with other banks partnering with real estate agents, Wang Lin felt uneasy and worried about the loss of his own bank's mortgage loan business, making it difficult to achieve the growth target for mortgage loan investment set by the branch in the second quarter.

Wang Lin found that in mid to late April, the mortgage loan volume of his bank was lower than the bank's expectations. Therefore, he quickly coordinated with the finance department to increase the cooperation fees with these large real estate agents, in exchange for the latter's mortgage loan volume in the second quarter increasing by at least 15% compared to the first quarter.

Wang Lin is well aware that relying solely on "additional cooperation costs" is not enough. At present, large real estate agencies in Shanghai have started to compare prices from three different banks, entrusting more of their mortgage loan business to banks with the most timely receipt of orders, the highest loan approval rate, the fastest disbursement of loan funds, the most sufficient mortgage loan amount, and employees' clothing that best meets their requirements.

On April 20th, Wang Lin reiterated a requirement to the retail business customer managers of various branches: when they enter and exit real estate agencies, male employees must wear formal attire, and female employees must tie their braids, in order to meet the dress requirements of large real estate agencies for service personnel.

In order to meet the requirements of these large real estate intermediaries for quick loan approval and fund disbursement, Wang Lin also organized a collaborative team to accelerate the efficient operation from mortgage loan processing to risk control approval, and then to loan disbursement, striving to "outperform" other banks in mortgage loan processing efficiency and win the mortgage business in the hands of large real estate intermediaries.

In order to properly allocate the mortgage loan processing volume of each branch, some real estate agents have been rating the service quality of each cooperative bank on a monthly basis since May. The cooperative bank with the highest rating is expected to increase its mortgage loan processing volume by about 10% to 15% next month, while the cooperative bank with the lowest rating will have its mortgage loan processing volume compressed by at least 20% next month.

Grab the 'essential needs'

In the absence of cooperation with large real estate agencies, how to "get a share" in the fiercely competitive Shanghai mortgage loan market is a thorny issue that Han Tao has to face.

All he can think of is' competing for service '.

Since March, he has visited real estate agencies multiple times at 9pm to introduce mortgage loan products to homebuyers and assist them in collecting complete mortgage loan application materials. This is dislocation competition, "he said. During this period, most retail business account managers of banks have already taken a break from work, leaving themselves with unique opportunities to attract business.

In addition, since March, the real estate agents he has dealt with have encountered "non quality homebuyers" to varying degrees - they either have a record of overdue repayments or have unstable jobs. Faced with these 'non high-quality homebuyers', large banks in Shanghai are unlikely to accept such mortgage loan application materials due to risk control considerations. Han Tao took the initiative to collect the mortgage loan application materials of these homebuyers and handed them over to the risk control department. The risk control department believed that some of the homebuyers had controllable repayment risks, so he quickly notified the real estate agent to arrange for both the buyer and seller to sign a purchase contract. This made the real estate agent take notice of him.

In mid May, Han Tao received a notice from the branch requesting that customer managers involved in mortgage loan business reduce their outings. Later, he learned that banks began to worry about the rapid growth of mortgage loans in the near future, which could lead to new bad debt pressures. After the May Day holiday, a local bank received a "risk warning" and was asked to pay attention to the risk of bad debts in mortgage loans, whether there were any violations in the process of obtaining mortgage loan business, and whether the approval process for mortgage loans was overly simplified.

Starting from May 14th, Han Tao began to reduce his visits to real estate agents, which also gave him more time to think.

Han Tao found that five years ago in March and April, the transaction volume of Shanghai's real estate market was comparable to the same period this year, but the real estate market environment was vastly different - at that time, Shanghai's housing prices were in an upward cycle, and the booming real estate transactions mainly came from the public's buying sentiment and strong investment willingness. It was difficult to find a house with good location and high appreciation potential; The current Shanghai real estate market is showing a situation of "rigid demand bottoming out and slow recovery of improvement oriented real estate". Rigid demand housing with a total price of less than 4 million yuan (such as old dilapidated primary school buildings in urban areas or relatively convenient commuting properties in suburban areas) has become a key force in the recent record high transaction volume. These types of properties have become the preferred choice for banks to continue increasing their mortgage loan investments; Due to the significant impact of supply and demand, the issuance of mortgage loans for suburban properties that are prone to price fluctuations may be tightened due to factors such as internal risk control by banks.

At the end of April, Han Tao's branch invited several Shanghai real estate experts to discuss the development trend of the Shanghai real estate market. The feedback received was that the current Shanghai real estate market is still in the development trajectory of "price for quantity". The comprehensive recovery of housing prices in Shanghai requires meeting multiple conditions, including a sustained high transaction volume for more than three months, a continuous decrease in listing volume for more than six months, and a continuous increase in listing housing prices for more than three months in over 60% of representative residential areas. Currently, these conditions have not yet occurred.

Han Tao believes that with the strengthening of risk management in mortgage loan business by banks in Shanghai, the growth rate of related mortgage loan business will tend to slow down in the coming period. But he believes that under the pressure of personal business loans and car loans, mortgage loans are still a "life-saving straw" for banks in Shanghai to avoid negative growth in retail credit business.

(At the request of the interviewee, Wang Lin and Li Jun are given pseudonyms)