“For estate agents, big data is certainly worth paying attention to.”
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According to IDC’s Data Age 2025 research, the amount of data across the globe that’s open to analysis is set to grow by a factor of 50 within just six years. As such, in 2025, the world is set to be creating 163 zetabytes (163 trillion gigabytes) of data a year.
That data comes from consumers, increasingly holding more and more of their information on cloud services. But an even bigger driver is business. Enterprises storing, interrogating and accessing more information will account for nearly 60% of data generated in 2025.
Manufacturing is often seen to be at the front driving this, but the property industry certainly isn’t far behind.
How data makes the property industry tick
When a potential homebuyer applies for a mortgage, the financial institution in question will – with a few key presses – dig into their credit background. They do this via systems that seamlessly interrogate big data to come up with a recommended course of action. Already, one single mortgage application, processed in a matter of seconds, draws on around 30 years of research and analysis.
Separately, that same homebuyer is likely to be hitting Google, and getting detailed statistical information about the area they want to live in, the quality of the schools, the local crime rate, and fluctuations in average property prices. The property portals they’ll be using, like Zoopla – holding information on 27 million homes in the U.K. alone, coupled to over a decade of house selling price data – will be churning through their own data sets to output results.
Estate agencies will also be harnessing their own data, and that’s what we’ll be diving into here.
Current usage
The way that estate agents use that data and the way agents will be using data in the near future are both fascinating subjects.
In terms of current usage, most estate agencies already collect vast quantities of data – from the numbers of arranged viewings and the status of managed tenancies, to information on new stock and house price data.
But data alone can’t give an agency a competitive edge. Agents need the right tools to simplify and digest it all. With those tools, analysing data has really allowed agents to do three things:
Firstly, it’s empowered agents to analyse their entire business models. Estate agencies can keep on top of their performance, identify areas that need fine-tuning, and are already making significant gains in terms of efficiency and productivity that simply wouldn’t be possible in the absence of that data.
Secondly, it’s enabled agencies to create efficiencies in their business processes. Data can show agents areas of high demand or those at risk of withdrawal, for example, and agents can quickly identify issues or opportunities to generate more appraisals and listings.
Last but certainly not least, data has given agents a much more vivid picture of their market. Agents know much more about their customers – their demographic tendencies, their wants, their dislikes, and their budgets – as well as the property market itself.
What kind of buyer should be targeted? What are the purchasing priorities of a person in ‘this’ demographic? How are prices changing in the area? Why are leads not converting?
Today, agents with the right software can answer it all.
Developments
But what’s around the corner will shake things up even further.
As I wrote in a previous Forbes article, existing AI and machine learning capabilities in property aren’t quite as breath-taking as marketing teams like to claim. Nevertheless, intriguing progress is being made in the space.
Machine learning (ML) is moving towards the point where it can generate insights more quickly, and in time, ML technology will enable estate agencies to think, not just about what the customer wants right now, but what the customer will want.
Collecting data from social media, emails, and calls, and merging this with transaction and market data, agents will be able to discover much deeper insights on customer preferences.
Property AI itself will evolve from serving information to recommending action. As research on data analytics from Ventana concluded, “by 2021, two-thirds of analytic processes will no longer simply discover what happened and why; instead, they will also prescribe what should be done”. In other words, big data won’t just be asking questions, it’ll be answering them too.
The rise of the internet of things (IoT) will also be pushing more data onto estate agents. Smart devices in the home will be a big contributor here.
Smart devices will ultimately support estate agents, particularly those with large managed lettings or property management business units, helping them to predict maintenance requirements, provide comprehensive insights driving more accurate profitability ratios, and even predict efficiencies based on tenant behaviour patterns.
The human touch
For estate agents, big data is certainly worth paying attention to. There are opportunities to capitalize on with the current technology that’s available, and by working effectively with the data at their fingertips, the mix is there for everybody to benefit. However, the caveat for true success from data insights will always be an agency’s ability to use that data to drive an ever-improving personal experience. The human touch is, and always will be, what amplifies data insight to a service level that will inevitably be greater than the sum of the parts.