Real estate brokers have so many data collecting tools to choose from that it can often be confusing when it comes to choosing the best ones and making them work together.
What follows are a few tools and resources for brokers who’re looking to capture and analyze data, and use those insights to boost their business outcomes.
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Gathering Data
For brokers it’s important to look for data that’s focused on potential customers. It doesn’t matter if its past clients or new leads – what’s important is we can access data that helps us to locate people who’re likely to consider buying or selling a home.
Such data can be built or it can be bought. One tactic is to simply list every home in your local catchment area, then send emails and/or postcards to these people in the hopes of recruiting some clients. But this strategy is relatively simple, and certainly not very targeted. So how can we do it better?
Two companies that can definitely improve your chances are Rebogateway and Smartzip. Instead of reaching out to everyone in your city, these services allow brokers to pinpoint which areas of a city are likely to turn over faster.
For example, if West Seattle is your market, but zip code 98136 turns over every five years and zip code 98126 turns over every 12 years, then it’s time to point more of your marketing at 98136. After identifying those tracts, the broker can make more strategic decisions about which part of town to focus advertising dollars.
The next step is identifying likely sellers by identifiable events. Instead of ignoring the rest of West Seattle outside of 98136 with its high turnover, brokers can get alerts to events such as divorces, expired listings, FSBOs, defaults, probate, and so on, across a broader area. Targeting these kinds of property owners will result in significantly higher rates of conversion than blindly blanketing the market.
Building Your Own Database
Creating a customer database that’s large enough to be an effective marketing platform isn’t easy. It takes time and commitment to provide something of value to your database. It becomes highly valuable, though, when targeting potential buyers and sellers.
Using a website platform call Real Geeks, you can create a registration system that draws your site visitors in and keeps them coming back. You can then send out new listing drips every day, based on user’s past search behavior on your website. It’s the best drip campaign money can buy, and they will feel that you’re delivering something valuable to them.
After you’ve built up a large database of users, you can now target them in buyer or seller campaigns.
Layering the Data Effect
Of course, sending postcards doesn’t sound like a high-end use of technology, but when we identify prime targets and then combine that data with other tools, we can supercharge the connections we have with those potential clients.
Social media advertising has grown greatly in popularity in recent years, but many brokers are still using scattershot methodology. With our predetermined 98136 zip code of high-turnover homes, we can target the most likely home sellers or buyers in that area. Advertising online allows us to go so much further than blasting an ad or postcard to an entire zip code or city. Much like probability targeting in postcards, we can take Facebook or LinkedIn ads to the next level by selecting the age range, area of residence, marital status, level of education, or even the company that we want in our ad recipients.
We could target the ad to users who live in 98136, are married, have college degrees, are over 35 years old, and work in the software industry. The first step is to find the data to pinpoint who the likely sellers and buyers are in your market. Once you have your prospects nailed, this strategic method of focused advertising reduces cost in a huge way and increases conversion rates significantly.
Connecting via Social
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The other opportunity for those who build their own database is the chance to move your connections over to other platforms. With registered users’ e-mail addresses, brokers can use tools like Rapportive to automatically find the social media profiles of every user. Connecting with these users via a personal Facebook account, company Twitter account, or LinkedIn are all good ways to strengthen your long-term connection.
We can also see what style and location of homes these users have been searching for on the websites. If we segment our database of users into groups by search locations, we have even further targeted prospects. Any time we list a new home, we can send it to just that segment of our users who are looking in the same area, instead of blasting everyone in the database, to whom 90 percent find it irrelevant.
E-mail may not cost money in the way that print mail does, but it’s still costly if it’s overused. Keeping your audience engaged and not overwhelming them is highly important to staying out of spam filters and continuing to be able to reach them.
Closing the Sale
Getting new clients via big data is a great first step, but using data to actually find the buyers for you or your agents’ listings can also be done better by using data. We use Coldwell Banker’s CBX tool, but there are other sources of profiling data as well. We can pinpoint the kind of buyer who is most likely to be purchasing in the area where our listing resides, and then create a map of likely nearby locations of buyers. From their employment, income, and age range, we can show our sellers where we’ll be targeting our marketing for the most likely buyer candidates.
It’s not only a strong part of a listing presentation; it’s also a strategic way to ensure more of your marketing dollars are going to the most effective locations for your clients.
About Mike Wheatley
