Using Big Data To Beat The Competition – A Real Estate Guide

When the primary focus is sell, sell, sell, don’t forget about the data your real estate agency already has.

Why? Because it can play a huge part in getting you ahead of your competitors.

Making the most of big data can get your brand seen by more people, help you target the right people and gain you more listings.

So what’s the big deal?

Put simply, big data is when businesses collect information about their audience using both traditional and digital sources. By collecting the right data, you can gain powerful insights into your audience’s personality. Knowing this will help you to understand how they’ll react to certain stimuli, meaning you can adapt your campaigns to each individual’s characteristics.

As the name might give away, big data does provide an infinite amount of information, but this doesn’t have to be intimidating. By selecting core sections of the data, you can focus your analysis and generate impressive results.

Although the collection method is also important, how you analyse the data is crucial to getting the results you want. By picking out certain aspects of the data, you’ll be able to seriously boost your knowledge of the local area, which will give you a significant edge over other real estate agents.

Okay, so how do I collect big data?

There are several popular methods used for collecting big data. Take a look at the list below and decide which work best for you:

Email surveys

Straightforward and easy to execute, the traditional survey is a strong method of gaining data from residents of your local area. By asking for answers on a scale of 1-10, you’ll be able to quantify the results into data for analysis.

If you haven’t surveyed your local population before, you might find the results surprising. This is a valuable method of gaining an insight into your local community and will help to give you an idea of whether you’re marketing your business to them correctly.

By developing an understanding of your community’s advertising preferences, you’ll be able to get a picture of who you should be targeting with your property advertising. If you collect enough data, you’ll be able to break the results down into age groups for increased campaign targeting.

Keep your survey short and to the point and test it on a couple of participants before emailing it out to your database. If you’re concerned about people ignoring it, try offering an incentive like a competition entry or a giveaway.

Tracking your audience online

If you’ve got a website, why not make the most of it? By activating a tracking platform, such as Google Analytics, you can gain powerful insights into how your online audience interacts with your website. Among many other features, Google Analytics will show you which pages your visitors are looking at, how long they spend on each page and which page they exit your site from. Over time, you’ll notice patterns emerging with your audience’s viewing habits, which you can action and use to improve your site.

For example, if visitors are spending a long time on one particular blog post, it could be worth creating more content of a similar topic. If a large percentage are leaving your site – known as bouncing – on a particular page, perhaps it’s time to add in some additional site links to continue their journey.

This data can also help you to drive online advertising performance. If one of your online pages is already converting well, it could be worth setting up a pay-per-click campaign with Google to drive additional traffic to that page. As the name suggests, you pay every time a person clicks on your ad, so it’s worth working out the costs and what ROI you expect before setting this up.

Make the most of existing market statistics

You don’t have to collect all of the data yourself. Tools such as CoreLogic are among the best data resources in the industry for real estate agents. Years of research have gone into the data that Corelogic provides, making it an invaluable resource for your analytics.

Aside from Corelogic, the Australian Bureau of Statistics provides profiles of whole communities, which can be useful if you’re looking for a broader overview.

Listen to your customers

By far, your current customers are your greatest assets. By generating a feedback form and sending it out via email, you’ll be able to find out why they chose you and what areas they feel you could improve in. By collating this data and analysing any emerging trends, you’ll be able to reshape your services to better suit future buyers.

So I’ve got my data – now what?

The possibilities for what you can do with big data are literally endless. It can be easy to get overwhelmed by it, so the best way forward is to ask yourself the following:

• What do I want to know?
• Why do I want to know it?

For example, you might want to know which region gives you the most web traffic, so you can target your next marketing campaign to that location.

Once you know what you want from your data, you’ll be able to set about analysing it. Considering the workload involved, it could be worth outsourcing the project to a professional data agency, or hiring an experienced analyst to gather your results for you.

By utilising big data, you’ll be able to find out more about your target audience than ever before. Use it to optimise your campaigns and watch your ROI increase.