When Lisa Claes was growing up, her mother worked as a real estate agent, so there is a nice symmetry in Lisa's return to the industry. But don't be misled, Lisa has had a varied and hugely successful career, and hopes to inject some of the wisdom she has gained on her journey to improve the way the property industry operates.

Claes began her career as a barrister followed by a period as general counsel in a global organisation, and after a stint in financial services, moved into banking at ING. Her most recent role before joining CoreLogic was as the head of retail banking at ING Direct.

ING is well known for its strong customer focus, and it was here that Claes learned to look at things from the customer's point of view.

"Everything we did, we co-created with customers," she said. "We'd bring customers in to build the latest app, or design product features for us, and we'd test and learn along the way."

ING has also been successful at delivering its services digitally.

Customer focus and digital delivery, Claes believes, will be the key to CoreLogic's success, and the key factors that interested her in joining the company. 

Claes believes that property data is hugely powerful in Australia, and has the potential to be even more so.

The potential in property data

Property, says Claes, is the centrepiece of Australians' wealth basket, both statistically and psychologically, and that understanding the property lifecycle of the customer can be a springboard into deeper relationships.

Claes believes that real estate agents will have more potential to develop customer relationships if they can use data intelligently. With deep property knowledge and market information, agents can build relationships that extend through the property life cycle of the customer.

"I see real estate agents being able to be a valued service provider beyond the sale, throughout their (the customer's) life," she said.

She gives the example of calling customers on the anniversary of a purchase to update them on the market, and on the value of their home, and the equity they've built up in their home, potentially for another purchases, or referrals to other services.

"Agents could become a trusted advisor," she said.

"Finance is largely a utility in people's life," said Claes, "so you become relevant, and prominent, and relied upon when you actually add value to the customer's life."

Claes's vision for real estate agents is closely aligned with her vision for CoreLogic. "Customers don't want products, they want solutions to their challenges or problems," she said. 

"At CoreLogic we have so much data and so many tools and so much intelligence around it, we're in a great position to provide that on to our customers."

Consolidating acquisitions

CoreLogic has made a number of acquisition in recent years, and one of Claes's priorities will be to get the data "integrated and streamlined" into the core business, and make it "even quicker and faster and better".

"Obviously that's a high priority for us, not only culturally and geographically, but, more importantly, platform wise and bring our centres of expertise into pools on a unified platform," said Claes.

Lessons learned

Claes joined CoreLogic as the company was receiving attention about changes to the way it calculated some of its indices. Though the matter has blown over, and the Reserve Bank continues to subscribe to CoreLogic's hedonic data, Claes says lessons were learned.

"We improved our sampling technique around how the hedonic index treats extremely high and low transactions which created a temporary blip, it was 0.8% across the combined capital cities - it was immaterial statistically," she explained.

"What we didn't do, and this is a learning for us, is that we didn't communicate the changes as well as we should have. We should have advised our stakeholders of the changes.  We have already repaired this process within the business, and will ensure any changes to our analytic processes are accompanied with notes explaining any changes in detail."

Ambition, and the importance of maths

Claes's ambition and passion for business is clear as we speak, and I ask if she has any career advice.

"I really enjoy watching people grow," she offered. "I would say for people starting their career there are two things. Create or construct regular feedback systems around you. In my career, I've grown the most by getting feedback about my performance," she said.

"And get close to the critical path in an organisation," she said. "Some functions, say the functions that drive sales, finance strategy, get close to those and you can become indispensable," she advised.

"Get your hands dirty, get involved," she said.

Claes said women must overcome traditional stereotypes if they want to be successful in the corporate world, and observed that women are also often torn between career and caring roles.

"They (women) are more conservative in their careers," she said. "But there's a really good reason for that, because women are subliminally planning if they want to have children, how they're going to fit that in, how they're going to care for parents. So they tend to not have the luxury (that men have) of saying 'that's my (career) runway and I'm just going to run along that'."

She stressed the importance of maths to being successful in business, and that it was important for women not to be put off by having to deal with numbers.

"You need to be numerate when you're running a business, whether it's your own business or running an organisation. You've got to read numbers like you read words, they both tell stories," she said. 

Claes says of her career, "It's a marathon, not a sprint. You need to build. It's a long distance run, you can't build this stuff overnight." Much like her strategic vision for CoreLogic.

See also:

It's no wonder Australians love property

Can big data really tell us when to buy or sell?

Growing women’s influence key to addressing gender gap