Danke collapsed ten months after its IPO — tenants cut off in 13 cities

Danke (蛋壳公寓) was one of China's largest long-term rental operators. Founded in 2015, it signed multi-year leases with landlords, furnished the apartments and rented them out by the month, and by early 2020 was running 419,000 units across 13 cities. It listed in New York in January 2020, the country's second apartment-rental operator to go public.

Growth was financed through rent loans: tenants were steered into bank loans that paid a year's rent upfront, giving Danke a pile of cash to sign up more landlords. At its peak more than nine in ten tenants used the loans; regulators responded in late 2019 with a rule capping rent-loan income at 30% of revenue by 2022.

Ten months after the IPO, the structure came apart. By November 2020, tenants in Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Wuhan reported cut-off utilities and landlords evicting them; suppliers went unpaid, and the company — three times named as a judgment debtor in a single month, with over ten million yuan owed — insisted it would 'never run away'. Occupancy had fallen from 89% to 75.6%, leaving an estimated cash runway of one to three months.

Lender WeBank told rent-loan borrowers they could keep living in the apartments and that credit records would be protected until March 2021; the stock, down 88.8% from its IPO price, kept sliding. The collapse stranded tenants, landlords and lenders across 13 cities, and made 租金贷 a national cautionary tale.