Wide spaces

Zhong said that the business－in terms of the number of customers closing deals with the company－h(huán)as grown at an annual rate of 300 percent since 2016, with more than 1,000 such homes successfully rented so far. They started renting properties early last year after renovations were completed.

The company has about 60,000 customers to date, with daily queries reaching about 4,000 to 5,000.

Zhuang Homes' customers include authors, artists, architects and professors seeking places where they can work in peace.

The high rental costs in the city mean renting a spacious property in a village can help lower costs for entrepreneurs starting their own businesses or people working in creative industries.

"Some artists have told me real estate developers in the cities cannot give such large spaces to them," Zhong said. "They will only give large spaces to those businesses that can afford the rental costs－for instance, commercial businesses like cosmetics and retail businesses. They will not reserve the space and give it to those in the creative industries, and neither will they give you a space that is 8 meters high."

Yang Bin, a 62-year-old researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is one of Zhong's customers.

The retired professor has always been interested in being closer to nature. He found out about Zhuang Homes when he was doing research online and thought that it was a good project. Together with some friends, Yang Bin has rented a village house in Beijing's Huairou district for about a year from Zhuang Homes.

"I believe this is a very forward-thinking business that has been realized in practical terms," Yang Bin said. "If this is done well in the future, it will have a very big effect on our country."

As an economics researcher, he is also interested in the project from an academic perspective and sometimes accompanies the company's employees to observe how it renovates the homes it will rent out.

However, as much as Yang Bin thinks it is a good idea, his busy city life has kept him from going to his rented village house as often as he would like.

"In my experience, everyone has their own schedule. Even though we feel that it is a good place, we still have our own personal and work lives, so the usage of the house is not very high," he said.

He has plans to share the rented property with a larger pool of people by putting it up for rent online.