Abstract: From the theory of embeddedness, firm’s social capital is an important resource. Based on the bank lending data of listed real estate firms, the paper finds that in addition to accounting-based and market-based variables, real estate firms’ bank-enterprise relationship, as one of the most important kinds of social capital, provides important information in explaining loan default, which helps to improve the predicting power of bank loan default risk models. The duration of bank-firm bilateral relationship, the real estate-oriented age and the state-owned background have negative effects on default risk. The role of bank-firm multilateral relationship depends on the size and structure of the network.