The Real Estate Industry and Big Data

Big data has finally been recognized by the real estate industry as one of the best ways to grow business and gain profit. Now more than ever, you can rely on big data and its avenues. The real estate industry has widely used traditional practices for marketing and learning about what buyers want. Now, they can use big data to help their business flourish while keeping cost-effectiveness in mind.

Here are some things to keep in mind when incorporating big data in the real estate business:

Thing big. Instead of setting limits, try looking at big data in a bigger way. Even small sets of data can be useful, but the amount of data that is out there is astounding. And more data means more possibilities when it comes to making business decisions and setting goals.

Don’t be biased. Instead of viewing different types of data as meaningless, look at them for their individual values. If you analyze them, they can be connected and give incredible insight. So, be selective with data without ruling anything out.

Collaborate and share. Data is now being sourced from conventional methods as well as newer ones like Facebook and Twitter. It’s also being shared throughout different types of industries and data teams are focusing on collaboration with their counterparts.

Be focused. Even before you begin to utilize your big data strategy, focus on your approach and your long-term goals for your company. This way, big data can help to answer the most important questions first by focusing on insights. It can also help you to prioritize your business goals.

Don’t rely solely on data. Remember that big data access and analysis do not override expertise and negotiation skills. While big data is extremely helpful in the long run for real estate companies, it certainly won’t solve all of your problems. Big data should be a complement to skills and knowledge in the industry.

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Big Data Strategy

Real estate companies are beginning to realize the importance of big data. However, many of them still do not have a well-thought out big data strategy. There is more to data analytics than discovering how many people visited your site yesterday. In fact, data has no value if it does not provide actionable insights. Builders and realtors need to experiment with volume and variety if they want their big data strategy to work.

Forward thinking organizations are quick to experiment with their products and services. This helps them discover what the customer wants. By making big data analytics an important aspect of your marketing strategy, you can accelerate that discovery.

To make your company more adaptable, you need to experiment with the different aspects of data:

Big data provides a wealth of insights

Big data is available in high volume. When you have access to insane amounts of data, you should be ready to experiment with them. Your experiments must focus on finding that project, which will do well in the existing market conditions.

If you are a builder, you will want to know what kind of projects will sell well in a particular locality.

Execute rapidly

Ask your team to come up with innovative ideas. Let these ideas eventually become your offerings. Here the key is making experiments at a fast pace. You should be able to change ideas into offerings in the shortest possible time. Market conditions can change anytime. You can't take years to launch a project you conceived today after experimenting with big data. You should minimize the time you need to bring that idea into the market.

If all of your offerings are based on one theme, you will land in serious trouble when that theme is off. That is why you need to experiment with ideas.

Think about the kind of services and products you can offer. Make sure that all of them are not of the same kind. You should also think about the potential market these products or services could serve. At any given time, you must have a mix of these products and services. So even if demand for one product decreases, you will still have something else to fall back on.

Don't forget your existing customers.

They are the biggest source of referrals for you. Retaining an existing client is easier than finding a new one, so keep in touch with them.  A real estate company tends to do better when it has a market-driven sales strategy. In this case, it understands a market very well and experiment with projects that tend to do well in that market.

Summary

Organizations that adopt big data tend to have a competitive advantage over others. An organization becomes adaptable only when it is ready to experiment and data analytics is the key to rapid experimentation. It doesn't really matter whether you are a big real estate company or an independent realtor who only serves one market, you can no longer ignore big data. At any given time, you must be experimenting with a large number of ideas. This helps you find that product or service which will ultimately sell well.

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Big Data and Its Impact on the Real Estate Industry

 

Big data can help sustainable development. Recent surveys have revealed that buyers are looking for homes with sustainable features. This presents both an opportunity and a challenge for the builder. Builders who incorporate energy efficiency features into their projects will have an edge over others who still rely on the construction standards of the previous century.

But how can a builder understand what sustainable features are popular with buyers? When they analyze big data they will know.

What is big data and why you should care?

Big data is a collection of large data sets that can transform the way buildings are built and managed. It may even affect government policy.

The biggest USP of big data is its speed. Data is being generated at an alarming pace. Every interaction we have with digital technology helps create big data. And to keep pace with the speed with which data is generated, organizations need to invest in competent analytics tools.

Big data provides reliable information in a matter of seconds. A real world analytics firm may take weeks or months to publish a report on sustainable features.

By simply analyzing the information your users leave behind as they navigate through your website, you can understand their priorities and requirements. You can, for example, use this information to identify the most important factors you should consider while choosing a locality to build its project. Data analysis has revealed that most buyers are looking to invest in a crime-free locality with lots of good schools. Buyers also consider commute time. When realtors know what their clients want, they can promote their listings accordingly.

Big data uses current technologies in innovative ways. Data helps investors assess the existing real estate market conditions. The real estate market in the US is recovering. Home prices and sales have gone up. Inventories and foreclosures are going down.

Data helps realtors understand what their customers want. Take for instance the case of a real estate firm that leases space to tenants. Since tenants in real estate are not an organized lot, it is not easy for realtors to make trends. Data helps fill that void. It helps the realtor target specific groups of customers.

Big data makes information accessible to just about everybody. This openness of information will ultimately force government to update archaic laws.

Data and its impact on sustainability

Hurricane Sandy brought issues such as resiliency and efficiency to the forefront. In order to improve a building's resiliency, you should be able to measure it.

A real estate data company recently analyzed data gathered from Local Law 84. This law requires buildings that measure 50,000 square feet or more to submit an energy benchmark report. People often believe that newer buildings are more energy efficient. However, the findings of this data analysis revealed that this was not always true.

Many masonry buildings built during the 1930s have comparatively low energy costs. As data becomes readily accessible, energy managers will be able to take measures necessary to reduce their energy bills. Homeowners can also use data to measure the ROI on their energy efficiency investments. This may even encourage others to invest in green technology.

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How to Store Your Data

Forward-thinking real estate companies have already started gathering and analyzing data. The problem with data is that it is mostly unorganized. And this poses many challenges for the data manager who needs an appropriate strategy to store and analyze data.

If you gather data, you will have huge amounts of both structured and unstructured data. How do you organize this data? This is a question that all data managers ask themselves.

One of the biggest data problems that real estate companies face is the large amounts of unorganized data that pile up. Data scientists are aware of the presence of unorganized data. They simply don't know what to do with it. Consequently, they ignore it. But after some time as the stockpile gets bigger and bigger, they will need to decide what to keep and what to throw away.

In some cases, industry regulations may ask real estate companies to keep data for specific periods of time. For example, builders and realtors will have to keep transaction details.

If you are a real estate company that has gathered a large amount of data, you should have a proper plan to sift through data repositories that need not necessarily have any value. You should also have proper strategies to de-duplicate data. You may have the same data in multiple locations. This is a mere wastage of valuable storage space.

Your instinctive drive is to throw away all old data; while at the same time, there is an inherent fear that you might require that data someday. How do organizations deal with the dilemma? The data may exist in internal legacy systems. It may also come from sources such as social media, web sources and machines. To make this information useful, the company will have to invest in long data capabilities.

You will perhaps have to reorganize your data systems over time. This involves sifting through your data repositories, and implementing standards that maintain accuracy. If your company lacks the expertise or resources to do this, you could consider outsourcing this process to data engineers who use cloud-based systems that unify this data into actionable information that will facilitate corporate analytics. And that makes sense because storing your data in the cloud is more economical than keeping it on your data center storage.

In addition, by moving your archival information to the cloud, you save yourself the trouble of having this information on the site. And when this data is finally required, you can retrieve it.

This strategy almost always works. But you may still have difficulty finding out which data you should keep and which data you should throw away. If you decide to keep all data, you will have to buy more storage space and pay more for it.

Data poses many challenges. Besides collecting it and analyzing it, you need to store it appropriately so that you can retrieve it when you need it. If you don't have an onsite system to store data, cloud-based solutions are your best bet. Besides storing your data, they analyze it and turn it into actionable insights.

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Why Builders and Realtors Need to Analyze Big Data

Big data has suddenly become big business. If you are a builder or a realtor, how can you benefit by gathering and analyzing big data? Will data help you sell more homes?

Yes. You might assume that only big organizations need to harness the power of big data. Far from it. Both small and large real estate companies can run their businesses better by analyzing customer data. However, a good understanding of how big data helps your business is essential to develop a suitable business strategy.

Data becomes valuable only when you analyze it. And proper data analysis helps you know your customer better.

Data analysis helps you gain an edge over your competitor

Several builders and agents still don't take the time or trouble to gather data about their target customers. By simply gathering and analyzing data, you can gain an edge over your competition.

By analyzing data, a real estate company can find out what kind of homes sell well in a particular locality. This knowledge will help the builder launch the right project in the right locality.

Data also helps builders and realtors find people who are more likely to buy or sell homes in the immediate future. This will help them create a marketing strategy that targets the right group of buyers.

Data gives you more comprehensive demographic information. It also shows you why certain category of homes sells well in certain localities.

Launch better marketing strategies

After analyzing big data about your customers and the real estate industry, you can use that information to expand your business. One advantage of using big data is that it helps you improve your marketing strategies.

If you run a website, by simply looking at who is visiting your site, you can create a marketing strategy tailor-made for them.

When you have access to data which shows you who your target customer is, you will have no difficulty launching a more personalized marketing strategy.

This kind of analytics is useful for several types of businesses. Data also helps you adapt your marketing strategies for future buyers.

Data helps you decide whether you should implement a marketing strategy or not

By simply analyzing the data gathered by your analytics software, you can decide whether or not you should implement a new marketing strategy. If you market your homes or services to people who are not interested in being a buyer or seller anytime soon, you are simply wasting your time and resources.

When you have real data about your customers and the real estate industry, you can find out whether you should expand your business to other markets.

Realtors sometimes make business decisions with no reason. However, when you work with data analytics, you can make sound business decisions with a reason. A well-thought out business strategy will only benefit you and your company.

How to gather data

It is not difficult for a real estate company to gather data. Most of them already run websites. By simply analyzing the key phrases that attract people to their website, a builder can find valuable information about their potential clients. Both free and paid data analytics software solutions are available.

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How Small and Medium Sized Real Estate Companies Can Benefit from Data Analytics

Data is being generated at an alarming pace. Every action that we perform today helps create data. Needless to say, in today's business world, data is a big force to reckon with.

Thanks to the availability of computers with large memory and storage, storing vast amounts of data is no longer a big deal. And hence small real estate companies have no excuses for ignoring the need to gather, store and manage data that pertains to their business. In fact, by using data analytics, a small builder or a realtor can gain advantage over their competition.

Here is why you need a data analytics strategy to retain your competitive advantage:

It helps you create a personalized experience for your customers

Customers are getting more and more demanding. These days, all customers want an experience which is tailor-made for them. Gone are the days when one size would fit all. But that is not surprising. Since you are working with customers of all kinds, it is not easy to create one business model or user experience that fits everyone.

On the flip side, if you have collected massive amounts of data, you can create an experience that will satisfy an entire category of customers having similar interests or needs. If you don't know anything about your customers this simply isn't possible.

Data analytics make your marketing more effective

Your marketing strategy should be designed to target specific groups of customers. If your marketing messages are personalized, the customer will get the impression that they are dealing with a trusted friend or associate. In other words, by leveraging data, you can create that personal connection with the customer.

By collecting as much information as possible about your customers, you will get to know them better. This will allow you to create personalized messages.

Data helps you clear your wrong assumptions

Many small real estate companies don't know what their customers want. They simply assume that they know everything but they don't.

By collecting and analyzing data about how you run your business, you can save yourself many troubles. If, on the other hand, your business strategy is built upon wrong assumptions, you will lose lots of money. Data analytics help prevent these problems.

It helps you identify your target markets

Who is your customer? Who are the people who buy your homes or hire your service? Until you know the answers to that question, you are simply guessing things. When you know who your customers are and what they want, you will be able to create an appropriate marketing strategy. This will also help you branch out into other markets.

Data analytics and quantification are great tools for your business. By making a small investment today, you can reap huge benefits later.

The resources that a small real estate company needs to implement data analytics are: data, the right tools and expertise. Data is now readily available. Thanks to open source technology, data analytics tools are also available. The only missing element is the expertise to analyze data.

However, if you are using a pre-packaged basic model, the expert support is needed only once.

By spending a few hundred dollars a month, a small business can host and maintain its data analytics model on a cloud-based server. The investment will result in productivity enhancements and typically pay for itself in a few months.

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The Growing Importance of Data Analytics

It seems that retail is fast emerging as the biggest adopter of big data. Nearly every global retailer is exploring how big data analytics can help to decode consumer behaviors and penetrate segments that have traditionally remained outside their reach. However, this doesn’t mean that other sectors aren’t sensitized towards the growing importance of big data.

Retail Might be Leading but Real Estate is Driving the Big Data Wave Too

Healthcare is aggressively pursuing the path of digitization and big data plays an important role in this journey. Real estate institutions are increasingly acknowledging big data capabilities which give them a better chance to evaluate risk and add more value to customer services. Real estate firms are using big data to re-assess traditionally unserved consumer demographics and create more sustainable customer relationships.

Real estate has always been among the biggest creators of consumer data. Somehow, this fact wasn’t widely acknowledged until recently. Even when retailer activities were limited to merely creating summarized bills, real estate was creating lots of useful consumer data. This included details about household incomes, bill payment patterns, and credit history.

Data Analysis Driving Real Estate Decisions

Today, realtors understand that their consumer facing activities need to imitate the big data efficiencies that retailers have gained. This means capturing, storing, cleansing, indexing, and analyzing data for better outcomes. The role of traditional data centers has changed. Earlier, consumer interaction wasn’t as conclusive. Now, consumers review, recommend, and emote about nearly every product/service. This includes conversations about brand loyalty or buying preferences. These conversations provide valuable insight into how geographical and regional demographics affect property buying or refinancing decisions.

Contemporary data centers need to be more proactive to consistently stream the web for such meaningful data. From time spent per webpage to the number of clicks per banner ad, and daily webpage views, most types of browsing patterns can be quantified. Once expressed numerically, they can be further analyzed. The analysis yields actionable information—this kind of data helps managers to take decisions with more confidence.

Using big data analytics, real estate businesses can optimize their products, services, and even webpage layouts and promotional messages. The idea is to be in sync with the mindset of consumers. Some other benefits of an effective data analysis team include:

• Ease of conducting market segmentation studies
• Identification of points of losing consumer interest
• Evaluation of efficiency of different points of sale
• Evaluation of consumer engagement efficiency across different channels like physical campaigns, calls, emails, and mobile offers etc.
• Gaining future readiness, i.e. being intuitive about emerging market trends
• Gaining insight about internal processes and staff performance
• Developing better, more sensitive competitor pricing strategies
• Local and regional market analysis for revenue growth forecasts
• Establishing seasonal patterns in revenue hikes or dips
• Ease of conducting consumer sentiment studies
• Real time monitoring of established and emerging consumer behaviors

Please understand that big data becomes fully useful when a business can gain multi-channel analysis and large scale improvement capabilities. A true big data infrastructure should drive improvement of internal processes like supply chain, recruitment, and even administration. Every internal dynamic of a business, ranging from logistics to warehouse optimization, can be enhanced with big data analysis.

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