We look at three ways agents can use 'big data' to find potential vendors more quickly and with less money wasted.
Every real estate agent has data – from customer relationship management systems, to knowledge of the local market, email contacts, history of sales and rentals, accounting systems and access to third-party market data.
But there is a difference between 'lots of data' and big data. Big data is defined by the presence of 4Vs – Volume, Variety, Veracity (accuracy) and Velocity. Big data done well uses what you know about your existing clients to help you find new clients just like them and make decisions based on facts, not gut feel.
Increasingly, big data is replacing the 'spray and pray' techniques of letter box dropping and generic broadcast advertising used by agents to help them find potential vendors more quickly and with less money wasted.
Here are three new big data techniques we see being used.
1. Making your mail outs more personalised
Grade: Easy
Personalised mail has always been more effective than anonymous sales collateral. Overlay a personal contact with knowledge about their property type (ie: number of bedrooms, street location etc) and your letterbox mailout can immediately become three times more compelling:
Dear John, We just sold (insert recent sale) just up the road from you. It’s a (insert number) bedroom home of a similar style to yours – and we received a record price of ($XX). If you’d like to understand how much your home is worth in the current market, please give me a call . . .”
2. Making your listing calls more targeted
Grade: Medium
Every property that sells is a source of data collection that is more than just sales price. Points such as the time we’ve owned the property, recent sales nearby, property features, and suburb demographics – are residents single, a couple, a new family, a growing family?
Big data – analysing these statistics at huge scale – is now able to take insights derived from past sales transactions and apply them to the unsold populace. In doing so, it can now come up with matches of people and addresses that are more likely to sell and rank them. This means agents can focus their cold calling and prospecting time on people who are statistically more likely to sell.
Typical cold calling of 100 people results in 1 lead. Early results from using big data based lead generation shows 15% of conversations were positive and resulted in an appraisal or callback and 10% of records listed within six months.
3. Making social media work harder
Grade: Harder
The ‘like’ button is clicked 4 million times a minute on Facebook, and each click is a data point that gives an insight into what interests and engages that user. With more than 240 million datapoints an hour, this makes Facebook truly one of the world’s biggest big data aggregators and distributors.
New tools are now emerging to help businesses target their advertising on Facebook with astonishing accuracy and efficiency. Quantium, one of Australia’s biggest market insights companies, is a preferred partner with Facebook, fusing the data from Woolworths, NAB, Foxtel and CoreLogic with Facebook.
For real estate agents, this means it is now possible to target content or advertising on Facebook to extremely specific audiences such as: 1 bedroom apartment owner occupiers who have recently changed their shopping purchases to include baby items. (potential sign of needing to move up). Or 4 bedroom home owners who have lived within a 5km radius of your office for more than 20 years and are now spending considerably on hardware or home maintenance (potential sign of downsizing).
Best of all, accessing the audience segments are free. You just have to be whitelisted with Quantium. Early case studies show using Quantium segments to target advertising on Facebook resulted in reaching fewer people, it boasted significantly higher website clicks and a lower cost per click. In layman’s terms: more activity for less cost.
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