Elite AgentElite Agent TVTransformTransform 2016 Coach

Listing by numbers, using data to engage prospects

Here are the highlights from our Super Six session with Core Logic GM of Real Estate who talked about getting the right mix of print and online advertising, return on advertising investment, working the numbers and making them work for you and your vendors. He also hinted at what is coming in the future in terms of big data intelligence.

Thank you our Week 2 sponsor:

Core Logic Australia. CoreLogic have also provided the supersix access to RP Professional for the 12 week Transform challenge, allowing them to get ahead of the game with the numbers in their local area.

Coaches:

Claudio Encina and Greg Dickason

Coaching Links:

  • Like the Super Six you can be an expert in your local area by finding out more about RP Pro here, or get a 14 day free trial here.
  • The Super Six also have access to Tom Panos Real Estate Gym, which has several templates for mapping out your ideal day.
  • Greg Dickason’s Blog

Video Notes/Transcript

00:00 Introduction and Session Overview: Samantha McLean

1:06 Using the science of numbers when talking to vendors

Really what I’m here to do today is to tell you about how you can make numbers sexy. I think more importantly when you’re talking to a vendor about getting a listing, or when you’re looking at, I hate to call it vendor conditioning, but when the markets changed, and you’re talking about what the market’s about. How you can use numbers to really back yourselves up. Data is always, the power with data is how it can tell a story for you.

We do have a thing called medium maximiser, which is over here. What that does, it gives you an idea of what the selling success is. In this case for the 6019 post code. Let’s scroll down here. You will see that properties that we call affordable, that’s $379,000 and less, 65% of them are only listed online. They’re not actually advertised in the paper at all. Prestige is only, it’s about the same.

In some areas you’ll see that’s quite different. You’ll get prestige properties are actually a lot more of them are listed in the paper than not. What’s more powerful then is you can actually look down and say what is success rate of selling, using the paper versus using online only. Everybody uses online, so you assume that’s going to be online. The questions is what happens with the paper. If you ever look at that, quite powerfully is a $59,000 increase in your sale price if you’re online versus if you’re not. Time to sell takes slightly longer, and your success rate is about the same. What’s quite powerful there, is you can ever talk about a return on investment. Advertising in the paper, what’s the chance of you actually getting your return back if you spend $5,000 advertising in the paper. That’s a pretty big number.

If you ever look at that, quite powerfully is a $59,000 increase in your sale price if you’re online versus if you’re not.

2:40 How data is collected

Let’s take a step back and talk about data collection. We get data from all different portals, and we get data from almost every paper out there, and we keep every aspect of the data. Not only the fact that it’s listed. Is it a color advert, whereabouts in the paper is the advert. Is it the middle, back, front. What’s the price? As a result we don’t just get the fact that the property is listed, we get the fact that the property is listed in this paper first, and then appeared online, and this is what’s happened to the price change. We can tell how quickly it’s changed in price, how long it’s been on the market, and what media is being used. Then what we do, is we put that into different buckets. We say in this post code, these suburbs were, these properties were only [advertised] online. These properties were [advertised] in the paper, these were [advertised] in both. Then we look at what’s the metrics for common market success rate, et cetera. We’re actually able to pull out from an enormous number of properties, and say this is how different ones performed.

3:40 VPA and willingness to sell

I also believe, and this is something we’ve definitely seen. At VPA, a persons willingness to spend VPA is also an indication of their willingness to sell. The more VPA they do, the more they’re prepared to commit to that process, and actually put their own money down. The more likely you are to get a willing selling. They’re not going to play games with you. We think that getting VPA as part of listing of a listing presentation or very soon after, is going to help you actually sell the property, and get your commission. That’s why these tools are really important for you to be able to use. Whether like this, or whether you’ve actually spent time yourself looking at your own success, versus your competitors, and saying, “Well, I’m in the paper, and I’m this much better as a result.”

4:24 Advertising Targeting buyers inside social media

What we are doing though, and this I’m extremely excited about, is that our ability to help you target buyers, and sellers inside Facebook has really taking a quantum shift in the last year. There’s companies like Quantium, Experian Marketing Services, and others, who have created Facebook platforms [for directly advertising to consumers]. They can take online and offline data and put them together. What I mean by that is if you’re on the internet and you do something. You search for instance radio controlled planes, you ever noticed you searched for holiday or something like that, and then if follows you around. It pops up wherever you go. What’s scary, well not scary, what’s really ridiculous is often you’ve bought it, and then you get adverts for it for four months after that.

Those systems that are built up what’s called referral advertising. Those systems are getting very, very good about taking data about different users and pulling it together. They’re starting to take offline data, like what you spend in Woolworths, or what you NAB credit card data tells you about, or what you watch on Foxtel. All of that data is getting pulled together, including some data from us. Like what house you’ve lived in, and what it’s worth. Creating a segment, so you’ve been anonymised, and then enabling you to target that segment inside Facebook. When you log onto Facebook it knows that you’re a 30-year-old, you work for a small to medium enterprise, and you earn between 100,000 and 200,000 a year. That then targets you with different appropriate adverts.

I want to do it [advertise] where they [buyers and sellers] are, which is not necessarily on a portal, it’s potentially inside Facebook. I’m potentially going to advertise my vendors property inside a platform where my users are everyday.

What’s cool though is that, that also means that you as agents can start to use people like us who are trying to make that available to you. You can start to say I’m looking for buyers. I know that buyers for this type of property actually come from this area, and this demographic, so that’s who I want to target. I want to list to them. I want to do it where they are, which is not necessarily on a portal, it’s potentially inside Facebook. I’m potentially going to advertise my vendors property inside a platform where my users are everyday. It’s pretty exciting, and that I think is where the wall is going to start to shift. It means that the whole idea that online, offline data are two separate pools are no longer the case. What you do online and what you do offline is starting to become merged into a single world. We’re going to make some of that available to you shortly. We haven’t delivered it as a product yet. You can though already buy those statements and sites inside Facebook. They’re advertise segments you can go in, and say inside Facebook I want to target this person. This type of person thought segments in Facebook.

Yeah, it pretty cool. It’s actually quite cost effective as well. Because you’re really only advertising to people you want to reach adverts. You’re not just paying for mass media, you’re paying for very segmented, focused, and targeted media. In that same way that Google Adwords does the same thing for searches.

7:08 What is going to disrupt real estate?

I do thing, and I often get the question do I think technology is going to disrupt real estate. The answer is yes. Does it mean that the real estate agents job is going to disappear? No. Because I think what’s going to disrupt the real estate agent is another real estate agent who’s just much better at using technology. The way they’re going to do it, is they’re going to get the ability to be more face time with the customers. Because really your core skill, my belief is your core skill, is your ability to understand your customer and deliver to their needs. Which means face time with people.

You really want technology to make you more efficient, more abler to target the right people. Find them, and then work with them. Rather than muck around in prospecting that doesn’t work, or chasing after leads that people have gone through, but they’re really not clients.

You really want technology to make you more efficient, more able to target the right people. Find them, and then work with them. Rather than muck around in prospecting that doesn’t work, or chasing after leads that people have gone through, but they’re really not clients. You want to be able to qualify who you’re talking to, and then really have that good relationship. That’s our focus is to give you that honest rifle shoot.

That is another thing that I think you’re going to start seeing more and more of. Which is big data is starting to allow us to really understand users at the individual level. As much as in Facebook you can only target them as a segment. We’re going to start to create propensity models, or already have created propensity models. Which estimates the likelihood of somebodies real estate property.

I look at things like how long people have lived in these properties, what they’re life stage is, et cetera. Come up with a likelihood that they will list. Randomly about 5 to 7% of properties will list in a year, depending on the suburb and the volumes, but it’s about that. Which means in a quarter, about 1 to 2%. Not a lot, so if you knock on a hundred doors, and you just random, 1% of those people will list their property. Our model is going to lift that to between 5 and 10%. You still got to knock on the doors, but now every 10 to 15 doors you knock on, you’ll get a listing, versus every 100 doors. That’s the hit rate you’re starting to get, and it’s a much more effective way. We know the next quarter, which should make it much better for you to change your prospecting approach. Rather than doing letter drops to 100, you can do door knocks to 10.

In my case I live in Brisbane. I live in a suburban pocked of acreage. People talk about my suburb as if it’s acreage, but there’s actually 400 houses that are part of a suburb pocket. We’re a very different demographic. We don’t have to mow the lawn every weekend for one. As a result I don’t get anybody telling me of those 400 properties, this is the median price, this is the time it takes to sell. All of that data you can pull out of us once you’ve created that territory. Then you can essentially own that pocket of 400 house. Which on average is going to sell 28 a year. Potentially that pocket is going to be a pretty good base for you to earn your yearly comp. Just off the sales on that little pocket. It’s very easy to become the expert. Create the territory, run the stats on the territory, and you can create a very nice content for people to pick up. That’s the way to do that. You can do that at street level as well. You can search for the street itself.

Questions?

If you have questions for the coaches or for the Super Six tweet us @eliteagentmag #transform

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Greg Dickason

Greg Dickason is Managing Director Pacific at LexisNexis the leading provider of Content, Analytics and Software solutions for Legal, Risk and Compliance.