"Fatal" Construction Site

Years ago, a tower crane casualty occurred at a residential construction site in East sanhuan, Beijing. The developer of the project just arrived in Beijing shortly afterwards.

Ten years later, construction accidents are still a dull pain in China's real estate industry.

On the afternoon of January 5th, some scaffolding collapsed in the ecological leisure tourism development project in Baden City, Wuhan, resulting in 6 deaths and 5 injuries. Over the past year, Shanghai, Langfang, Yangzhou, Guiyang and other places also suffered many accidents involving many famous developers.

With the industry scale competition since 2015, high turnover has become the standard of 100 strong housing enterprises. The management of runaway Housing enterprises has been out of control. Many second tier cities and large housing enterprises have successively undergone major engineering accidents or quality crises, causing many deaths or injuries and triggering owners' "rights protection".

In addition to man-made rush, the main responsibility of the construction industry is unclear, illegal subcontracting chaos, lack of supervision or not in place, is also the reason for frequent accidents.

Many people in the industry interviewed by the economic report in twenty-first Century believe that in order to avoid or reduce similar incidents, housing enterprises should put aside the "only scale" thinking and pay attention to the improvement of safety, quality and business efficiency.

In addition, site construction safety management and supervision must be implemented in place, and the responsibility system should be established, and the further development of construction technology and technology should be expected, including the maturity of residential industrialization and the application of intelligent machinery.

The pain of overspeed growth

Over the past 5 years, it is a big bull market in the history of real estate. Many housing enterprises have doubled their scale and doubled their growth. For example, Biguiyuan has achieved a 5 fold increase over the past 5 years, while Hengda has increased 3 times.

China is a black horse, and has achieved 7.5 times growth in five years. Now it is among the top four. Even robust Vanke has increased 2.3 times over the past 5 years.

Other high-speed growth also includes Xincheng holdings, Xu Hui, sunshine city and so on. By the end of 2019, 100 billion housing enterprises had reached 36, and three housing enterprises were over 600 billion. The first country of Guangxi garden was about 770000000000, trillion yuan was just around the corner.

At the same time, housing enterprises have frequent engineering and quality problems. In June 24, 2018, an accident occurred in a construction project in Fengxian District, Shanghai, killing 1 people and injuring 9 people. In July 26th, the collapse of a building site in Jinan District, Anhui City, Lu'an, resulted in 6 deaths and 3 serious injuries. In December 29th, the Shanghai Minhang District Qibao ecological Park collapsed on the construction site, killing 3 workers.

In October 28, 2019, an underground car park collapsed in the Guiyang area. 8 people were killed and 2 injured, followed by the Wuhan accident in January 5th of this year.

All of these accidents involve many large developers, and these housing companies are also fast growing business representatives in recent years.

A senior builder who has built many developers' projects said that there was a certain probability of construction casualties in the industry, but a large accident involving more than 3 people died in large housing enterprises was rare.

Zhang Dawei, chief analyst of Zhongyuan Real estate, believes that there is a probability problem in engineering accidents. The higher the probability of construction accidents, the higher the probability of accidents. In addition, the scale of enterprises will increase, and the operation management will not be coordinated, and the probability of accidents will also increase.

Huang Lichong, co-founder of strategic management group, also pointed out that in recent years, developers have pursued large-scale growth and high turnover, making their general financial pressure relatively large. To speed up construction to the level of sales can mean an early profit, which is "collusion" with illegal subcontracting and so on, resulting in greater probability of accidents.

In the accident investigation report of Shanghai Fengxian District Safety Supervision Bureau, Fengxian project has a certain degree of rush to work, and all responsible persons such as the construction side and developers are punished.

In the Guiyang accident, the project changed from planning to getting the pre-sale certificate. It only took more than 4 months, and there was suspicion of rush to work.

Who conniving the "fatal site"?

In China's real estate industry, the so-called developers do not directly cover houses, but are outsourced to builders and contractors, that is, the builders; even among the mainstream developers, even if Biguiyuan set up their own construction team, there are still more than 80% of the project outsourcing.

Non real estate development projects. In recent two years, subway projects involving safety incidents are also related to subcontracting and subcontracting.

According to the relevant laws, the constructor is responsible for the construction project and the safety. But in practice, the construction side often outsourcing and breaking the contract illegally, resulting in unclear subjects.

In the middle of 2018, the national production safety bulletin of the construction industry showed that the main reason for the accident was that the main responsibility of enterprises was not implemented. In most of the accidents, the relationship between the general contracting, professional contracting and labor subcontracting of the construction unit is unclear and the responsibilities are unclear.

In September 2019, in the bulletin of the Ministry of housing for a typical case of "construction market and engineering quality and safety violations", half of the 15 cases were suspected of illegal subcontracting.

Take the Yangqu project in Taiyuan city of Shanxi Province as an example, the main illegal facts include the subcontracting of labor services to the unqualified Taiyuan Yongda Construction Service Co., Ltd., which is suspected of illegal subcontracting.

And is there any responsibility for developers? According to the twenty-ninth provision of the "building law", the general contracting unit of a construction project can subcontract part of the project to a sub contracting unit with corresponding qualifications, but in addition to the sub contract stipulated in the general contract, it must be approved by the employer.

In reality, developers do not always know who the project is subcontracted to. The contractor may find a sub contractor without qualified construction team, but developers do not have strong supervision over it.

Huang Lichong believes that often those willing to invest in the construction team become the first choice for enterprises, and the construction team's internal subcontracting is mainly based on cash flow and capital flow, ignoring safety and quality.

In addition to subcontracting chaos, the above circular pointed out that construction, supervision and other units were not able to supervise and rectify the potential safety hazards at construction sites.

There are many examples in this regard. In the South River area project of Nanjing City, which was notified by the Ministry of housing, a chief supervision engineer did not seal the practice seal after reviewing the special construction plan of the sub divisional project which was more dangerous.

Although they are not the main body of responsibility, they often face the outside world and assume joint liabilities after the accident.

This point, developers feel "very unfair."

Financial commentator Yan Yuejin believes that illegal subcontracting makes housing enterprises faced with the embarrassment of unclear responsibilities and responsibilities, that is, whether the safety and quality problems are whether the housing enterprises undertake or the builders; but from the case, the housing enterprises ultimately need to bear joint and several liability, which in turn force the housing enterprises to supervise and standardize the subcontracting.

Zhang Dawei also believes that reducing the occurrence of safety accidents requires government supervision and internal self supervision.

Safety revolution in construction industry

Large developers' projects are just a few cases in many engineering accidents. In the Ministry of housing's accident reporting system, we can see more.

Supervision departments have been emphasizing and standardizing construction safety for many years. In November 30, 2019, the latest documents jointly issued by the Ministry of housing and emergency management showed that we should strengthen the construction safety from the aspects of safety production commitment system, revoking the qualification of responsible personnel, increasing the accountability of responsible personnel, strengthening the criminal responsibility investigation of responsible personnel, and strengthening the punishment of responsible personnel.

One of the biggest highlights of this document is to strengthen the accountability and discipline of responsible personnel, including criminal responsibility.

In December 6, 2019, the Ministry of housing and the Ministry of housing said that "the information management system for safety accidents in the construction of municipal housing projects will be completed as soon as possible, and information on accidents will be disclosed."

For housing prices, the 30 years of relying on manpower, manual mode of construction, it seems impossible to completely avoid accidents, tolerance of a certain probability of injury, but also become the industry's hidden rules.

But the right to life can not be ignored. When successive accidents happen, the industry should also reflect on the mechanism behind the accident and whether there is any possibility of improvement.

Zhong Wei, a finance professor at Beijing Normal University, believes that housing companies should avoid high turnover theory.

Since 2015, high turnover, Gao Ganggan and high growth "three high modes" have become the mainstream of the real estate industry; but at present, "high turnover is no longer the only important thing, and other indicators need to be weighed" too.

Yan Yuejin also believes that housing prices should not be too much in pursuit of speed, slowing down the pace of development is very necessary, rather slow down, but also to be safe.

Huang Lichong reminded that first, housing enterprises should reduce their liabilities and properly reduce their leverage so that the development speed can return to normal, so that the constructor can return to the level of focusing on quality. Secondly, the board of directors should properly decompress the management and prevent the management from becoming "ants on the hot pot", so that the next level can also return to normal working speed, ensure the quality of construction and reduce accidents.

Large housing companies are also strengthening their own safety control and control. Vanke and Biguiyuan have built up a long-term management and control mechanism for safety and quality work, making it a normalization and encryption work.

Biguiyuan in the construction contract, giving the construction party and Party A equal rights, if the developer's instructions exist safety and quality problems, the construction side can refuse to execute, and report to the developer headquarters; will also extend the control to the construction before, and all partners.

In addition, a number of companies to promote the opening of the site, allowing owners and other parties to enter the site for full supervision.

In view of the current manpower intensive construction industry, Mo Bin, President of Biguiyuan believes that only through continuous cost investment and large-scale promotion of new technologies can we really overcome the hidden dangers of building safety and quality.

Vanke, Zhonghai and other developers are also spared no effort to promote residential industrialization and BIM intelligent building system.

In January 7th, Yang Guoqiang, chairman of Biguiyuan, revealed that the company's Bozhi forest robot had submitted more than 1500 patent applications, and 59 Construction Robot projects, of which 29 had entered the site testing stage.

In Yang Guoqiang's view, the combination of assembly and construction robots is the only way for future buildings. "Next we will have assembly plants to produce standardized accessories, and the efficiency of building robots will be unimaginable."