The case of Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank Corporation (002958.SZ) withholding 5.03 million yuan in property fees has drawn market attention. Notably, the bank is not unable to pay but is attempting to link the property fee payment to another lawsuit—it is suing the developer of Jinan Tianan Times Square, Shandong Tianan Real Estate Co., Ltd., and intends to make resolving that dispute a condition for paying the property fee, while also seeking a discount.

However, the property management company, Jinan Huahaiquancheng Property Management Co., Ltd., has not accepted this proposal. A complex three-way negotiation involving the bank, the developer, and the property management firm awaits resolution.

A review of related judicial cases reveals that Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank is involved in numerous legal disputes, with over 1,500 judicial cases currently recorded. Among these, more than 800 are disputes where the bank is the plaintiff, suing borrowers and credit card holders. This data points to a significant risk transmission chain: while the scale of personal consumer loans and business loans continues to expand, the non-performing loan ratio is also quietly rising.

Why has the 5.03 million yuan property fee been withheld? A "payment notice" was posted on the main entrance of Tianan Times Square in downtown Jinan. This commercial office building, known as the "Wave Building" due to its wavy glass curtain wall design, is partly owned by Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank, which holds the property rights to floors 1 to 4.

The notice stated that as of December 8, 2025, Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank owed Huahai Property Management 3.3981 million yuan in property fees, 170,500 yuan in water and electricity charges, and 1.4616 million yuan in parking space management fees, totaling 5.0302 million yuan. Despite repeated reminders from Huahai Property, the amount remains unpaid. If payment is not made by December 31, 2025, further measures will be taken.

Three months have passed, and the bank has still not settled the debt.

The lawyer representing Huahai Property in this dispute confirmed that Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank acknowledges the debt but has other building-related disputes with the developer, Tianan Real Estate. The bank has made resolving those disputes a condition for paying the property fee and has also requested a discount on the amount.

If the developer and the property management company were related, such a request might be reasonable. However, according to Tianyancha data, Tianan Real Estate and Huahai Property are not linked by equity. The only connection is that one director of Tianan Real Estate serves as a supervisor at a company associated with Huahai Property. From a corporate rights perspective, there is no obligation to reduce the property fee, and Huahai Property has naturally rejected the proposal.

The case dates back to September 2017, when Huahai Property and Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank signed a "Property Service Contract" for the bank's premises in Tianan Times Square. However, shortly after the bank began renovations in early 2018, work stalled, and the area has remained vacant since, with property fees going unpaid. The bank's refusal to pay may be related to this situation.

Huahai Property has repeatedly requested payment. In July 2025, it sent a formal notice stating the total debt, including late fees, exceeded 8.866 million yuan, and offered to waive the late fees if the principal was paid. The bank did not respond effectively, leading Huahai Property to pursue legal action.

The lawyer stated that the case has entered legal proceedings and is awaiting a court hearing. While no public information about this case is available, details of Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank's lawsuit against Tianan Real Estate can be found.

According to the case number, the lawsuit was filed in 2025 and involves a housing sales contract dispute, with Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank as the plaintiff and Tianan Real Estate as the defendant. The first hearing is scheduled for May.

A third party, Shandong Xinminghai Trading Co., Ltd., is also involved. As the company could not be contacted, the court issued a public notice on March 17 regarding the case. The notice reveals that Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank has the following demands: first, to remove the mortgage on units 103, 202, 301, and 401 in Tianan Times Square and assist in transferring the property rights of these units and 30 underground parking spaces to its name; second, to pay 133,500 yuan in违约金 and confirm that the remaining 4.3 million yuan of the total purchase price will not be paid.

After purchasing the commercial spaces on floors 1 to 4 of Tianan Times Square, Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank has faced difficulties in obtaining the property certificates. The project has a history of issues including loan disputes, land disputes, and equity conflicts. With falling property prices, Tianan Real Estate is deeply embroiled in legal battles, and its land and properties have been repeatedly seized. In this context, the bank's request to withhold the remaining payment appears practical.

How Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank will handle its lawsuits with Huahai Property and Tianan Real Estate remains to be seen.

Although this property fee dispute is an isolated case, it is not the only legal issue Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank has faced recently. Data from Tianyancha shows the bank is involved in 1,539 legal cases. More than 800 of these are financial loan contract disputes and credit card disputes, accounting for over half of the total. In over 1,400 cases, the bank is the plaintiff, representing about 90% of the cases. The number of lawsuits began to rise significantly in 2021, with 2022 to 2025 being the peak period.

These three sets of data outline a clear pattern: the cases are highly concentrated in financial loans and credit card disputes, reflecting risks in the retail credit sector; the bank's dominant role as plaintiff indicates its reliance on legal means for debt recovery; and the high incidence of lawsuits coincides with the recent macroeconomic downturn, suggesting external environmental changes have持续 pressured the bank's asset quality.

Since 2021, although Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank's loan scale has continued to grow, the growth rate has逐年 declined, with rates of 3.31% in 2024 and 3.19% in the first half of 2025.

However, personal consumer loans and personal business loans have been expanding rapidly. From 2022 to 2024, personal consumer loan growth rates were 27.37%, 37.54%, and 37.76%, respectively, while personal business loan growth rates were 19.55%, 14.62%, and 13.23%. By the end of the first half of 2025, personal consumer loans and personal business loans stood at 6.89 billion yuan and 46.485 billion yuan, respectively, up 17.7% and 0.35% from the end of 2024.

As the high-quality mortgage asset segment slows down, banks urgently need to find new profit growth points, turning to low-threshold, easily scalable consumer loans to fill the gap. In recent years, the consumer loan market has seen intense competition, with banks engaging in price wars, continually lowering interest rates, with some rates falling below 3%.

However, this "volume-for-price" strategy has side effects. While the scale expands rapidly, the non-performing loan ratio for consumer loans has also risen, with some banks showing signs of asset quality pressure. Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank's consumer loan non-performing ratio was maintained below 1% before 2020, rose to 1.57% in 2021, and continued climbing, reaching a peak of 2.01% by the end of the first half of 2025.

Currently, personal consumer loans account for less than 10% of the total personal loan portfolio. Although the non-performing ratio is rising, the impact on overall loan quality is still limited. In contrast, the quality of personal business loans, which make up nearly 60% of personal loans, deserves more attention. The non-performing ratio for this segment fell to 1.59% in 2021, rose above 2% from 2022 to 2023, and fell back below 1.7% in 2024 and the first half of 2025, showing significant volatility.

The personal mortgage segment faces even greater challenges. On one hand, the scale has been shrinking since peaking at 32.456 billion yuan in 2022, falling to 26.675 billion yuan by the end of the first half of 2025. On the other hand, asset quality is under pressure, with the non-performing ratio rising from 0.23% in 2019 to over 1% in 2023, reaching 1.68% in the first half of 2025.

Overall, Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank's personal loan business is facing an imbalance between growth and quality. Personal consumer loans are growing rapidly but with rising risks; personal business loans have seen a recent decline in non-performing ratios, but their volatility indicates instability; and personal mortgages are caught in a dual dilemma of shrinking scale and rising non-performing loans.

Despite the increase in personal loan non-performing ratios, the bank's overall asset quality has continued to improve. The non-performing ratio was 1.73% in the third quarter of 2025, down 0.06 percentage points from the end of the previous year, showing a持续 decline since 2023. Although the non-performing ratio for corporate loans remains higher than for personal loans, significant progress has been made in reduction, falling to 1.95% in the third quarter of 2025, finally dropping below 2% after four consecutive years above that level.

Looking at specific sectors, the non-performing ratios for real estate and construction loans have recently fluctuated significantly.

The non-performing ratio for the real estate sector surged from 1.36% in 2024 to 7.17%, and then jumped to 21.32% in the first half of 2025, with non-performing loans reaching 2.095 billion yuan, far exceeding other sectors. Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank explained that the sharp increase in real estate loan balance and non-performing ratio was due to specific loan risks materializing, and the matter is being handled. The scale of real estate loans is being gradually reduced, with their proportion falling from 7.04% at the end of 2024 to 5.62% at the end of the first half of 2025.

Construction loans account for a relatively high proportion of the bank's corporate loans, consistently above 14% in recent years. However, their non-performing ratio has been volatile, recorded at 1.5% in 2021, 2.89% in 2022, 0.89% in 2023, and 4.5% in 2024, before falling back to 0.58% in the first half of 2025.

Overall, the non-performing ratio for corporate loans is stabilizing with a downward trend, though loan quality in certain sectors fluctuates considerably.

Affected by slowing loan growth and持续 declining interest rates, Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank's interest income is under pressure. However, thanks to effective control of deposit costs, interest expenses have decreased correspondingly, resulting in net interest income maintaining positive growth. In the first three quarters of 2025, net interest income grew 2.06% year-on-year to 5.509 billion yuan.

In terms of non-interest income, net fee and commission income continued to grow, but the growth rate has slowed from around 30% in the past two years to 2.51%.

More notable is the divergence within other non-interest income: on one hand, investment income continued to rise sharply, increasing 32.59% in the first three quarters to 1.574 billion yuan, mainly due to realized gains from bond disposals, reflecting a common trend among banks using proprietary bond investments to boost profits; on the other hand, fair value change income plummeted from 942 million yuan in the same period last year to 78 million yuan, a drop of over 90%.

This contrast is not unique to Qingdao Rural Commercial Bank. Increased volatility in the bond market in 2025 led to declining book values of existing bond assets due to rising bond yields. Most A-share listed banks saw fair value change income turn from profit to loss or shrink significantly. The反差 between realized gains and paper losses paints a true picture of bank non-interest income in 2025.

The sharp contraction in fair value change income dragged down the bank's revenue performance. Total operating revenue fell 4.92% year-on-year to 8.028 billion yuan in the first three quarters of 2025. However, net profit attributable to shareholders increased instead, rising 3.57% to 3.318 billion yuan.

The key to this反差 lies in the significant reduction in credit impairment losses. In the first three quarters, credit impairment losses fell to 2.053 billion yuan, a decrease of 886 million yuan from the same period last year, a drop of over 30%. Continued improvement in asset quality and effective reduction of non-performing loans have eased the pressure on provision计提, thereby releasing profit space.

Profit growth ultimately depends on endogenous动力 from the asset side. While corporate loan risks are gradually being resolved and the non-performing ratio has fallen below 2%, personal loans still face issues of prioritizing scale over quality.

Now, the unpaid 5.03 million yuan property fee has become an unexpected footnote in this struggle between scale and quality. The legal battles between the bank, the developer, and the property management company continue, with court hearings yet to take place. Whether the money will be paid or withheld, whether there will be a settlement or a court fight, remains uncertain. But beyond the 5.03 million yuan, the more than a thousand lawsuits behind this dispute silently testify to the aftermath of the rapid expansion of personal loans.