0
0
0

Starting a tech revolution in real estate

by Joe Ward

It wasn’t too long ago that the latest trends in real estate technology were virtual reality tours and drone photography. Now, agents are having to explore what were once far-out concepts, like artificial intelligence, machine learning, geofencing and blockchain. There has been an explosion in recent years not only of the technology available to agents, but also the money being poured into the tech side of the business.

In 2017, investors spent over $5 billion on real estate technology, a significant increase from $33 million in 2010, according to Forbes. (Much of that money has been poured into two of the country’s most valuable startups, Airbnb and the freelance office space company WeWork.) The money is being invested not because the buying and selling of homes is increasing as a portion of the economy. Rather, it’s because the real estate industry is fragmented, saddled with regulations and often slow to innovate.

In other words, it’s been an industry poised for a technological takeover. There are plenty of investors and startups seeking to do just that, while the traditional industry powerhouses remake their in-house technology divisions to keep up. And while the change and “disruption” — the favored term of technologists and venture capitalists — can be daunting to some, the overall goal is to make buying and selling homes as smart and easy as possible, for both agents and their clients.

The tech company, redefined

Now more than ever, brokerages are looking for technological advances to gain an advantage over the competition. Consider the rapid rise of Compass, a startup brokerage with a focus on developing cutting-edge technology, which has led to a nearly $2 billion valuation and the signing of 2,000 agents since 2016.

Compass has committed to cutting down on the inefficiencies in the real estate industry so that its agents have access to an easy-to-use platform that houses all the tools agents need to make more sales and advance their career, says founder and CEO Robert Reffkin.

Compass is currently touting a new customer relationship management (CRM) platform expected to launch in the third quarter of 2018. While there are more than 30 CRMs on the market today, Compass will have the first to compile clients, listings and transaction information on a single platform, Reffkin says. The CRM will incorporate some of the company’s existing tools, including the insights tool, a dashboard that provides agents up-to-the minute data on web traffic for their listings; and the collections tool, a client-facing visual portfolio that allows clients to communicate with agents in real time, as well as see pricing and status updates on properties they’re interested in.

Compass is well-prepared to help usher in a new, more technological era in real estate, Reffkin says. “We believe in a future where the experience is integrated, where everything you need to buy and sell homes exists in one place, on one platform,” he says. “Someone in real estate will create that one platform through which all real estate transactions happen. It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of who. Will it be a company that wants to empower agents? Or one that wants to displace them? We believe in ourselves and a future where agents are empowered, not displaced.”

Consider also that the nation’s biggest real estate franchise, Keller Williams, has essentially rebranded itself into a technology company with the hopes of becoming — in the words of owner Gary Keller — “the Amazon of real estate.” To do so, Keller Williams created KW Labs, the franchise’s innovation hub, and hired Adi Pavlovic, a former technology consultant who had no prior real estate experience.

KW Labs works as a product development incubator that leverages the knowledge of more than 159,792 Keller Williams agents to build new technology that will make their jobs easier.

“We’re the largest brokerage, so we should also be the smartest,” says Pavlovic, director of KW Labs. “We’re no longer building technology for the agents. We’re building it with them.”

One of Keller Williams’ greatest developments to date, according to Pavlovic, has been the creation of Kelle, a virtual assistant for agents. The technology is essentially a task manager for agents, and it seeks to consolidate the dozens of technology tools agents use on the job. For example, agents can ask the app about the status of their referrals or to list the contacts that the agent has not reached out to in three months.

The idea for the virtual assistant came from an agent, Pavlovic says.

“Somebody had an idea of Siri for real estate,” he says, referencing Apple’s artificial intelligence system for its devices. “We started asking, what kind of questions would you ask a Siri for real estate? We’re constantly getting feedback. The more questions we get that Kelle doesn’t know, the smarter it becomes because of computer learning. We’re working on what future versions will look like.”

Artificial intelligence has long been the domain of sci-fi thrillers and college classrooms, but the technology is impacting the real estate industry today in various capacities. There’s Keller Williams’ virtual assistant, which is on the cutting edge of AI use in real estate, and then there are chatbots, which have been adopted by virtually everyone in the industry.

Though chat icons have been on brokerage websites for years, the technology has advanced greatly in recent years. In the near future, artificial intelligence will shape every aspect of the industry, Pavlovic says.

“Chatbots are the first entry into artificial intelligence,” he says. “Over the next three years, you’re going to see companies leverage AI to be smarter about analytics, predicting what might happen with a home or an offer.”

“In my conversations with technology investors in the world, the No. 1 topic that comes up is artificial intelligence,” Reffkin adds. “I believe there is an opportunity to harness artificial intelligence to help supercharge agents to be more efficient and successful than they ever imagined, While artificial intelligence can be a little intimidating and presents a number of unknowns, this technology will help agents go from doing 50 transactions a year to 500 in the same amount of time with the same amount of effort.”


Read more of our real technology issue

With new tech initiatives underway, MRED is poised for future growth

Digital innovation helps @properties maintain its competitive edge

Survey: Agents talk real estate technology


Marketing moves

Technology isn’t just making task management easier: it’s also offering advanced lead generation, market analysis and advertising. Baird & Warner is one such brokerage using big data as the basis for its sophisticated marketing and advertising efforts.

Rather than cast the widest possible net in its marketing, Baird & Warner is using behavioral advertising to target those who are interested in buying and selling homes, then connecting them with an agent who would best suit their needs.

To do so, Baird & Warner gathers the information of people searching for homes online, as well as those who visit Baird & Warner’s website or search for a real estate agent, says Peter Papakyriacou, senior vice president for marketing at Baird & Warner.

“These are people who are undergoing major life events. Maybe they just got married or the kids went off to college. They’re what we call ‘intenders,’” he says.

Once Baird & Warner has determined its target market, it uses a location-based service called geofencing to place digital ads in a person’s feed whenever they are in a certain geographic area, like around suburban train stations or near Baird & Warner offices.

“It really kind of drives the behavior somewhat of who is truly interested in buying a property to have opportunities to connect with our agents or have more information,” Papakyriacou says.

A smart future

Why are all of these technological advances sweeping the industry? Because companies are starting to attempt to solve the one problem that has plagued innovation in real estate.

The industry is too fragmented, with too many local regulations, diverse trade groups and diverse data collection, experts say. The data collection problem is key, because uniform data sets are needed to create centralized, smart platforms that can provide the insights and information agents need. Much of that data is stored in the 800 multiple listing services in the U.S., which do not keep the same records or provide the same data.

“The real estate industry is incredibly fragmented today,” Reffkin says. “This fragmentation causes friction in the experience for everyone — agents and their clients alike.”

Papakyriacou says that though the industry is speeding toward a smart, technological future, the data have not kept up. Like many brokerages, Baird & Warner works with third-party vendors that seek to provide accurate, uniform data.

“What has not changed is the quality of the data,” he says. “We talk about the cleanliness of the data. That’s one thing we always look to when partnering with outside vendors. Big data is great, but the key is: bad data in, poor decisions out. It is collected from such a wide variety of sources that you don’t know the quality of the origin any more.”

Pavlovic says the person or company who solves the data challenge will be able to provide the best and most data-driven technology to its agents and clients.

“Organizations are trying to standardize that area, but there are challengers,” he says. “There’s a lot of cost and collaboration required. That’s one of the biggest challenges the industry has, is centralizing the data sources. Without that data, it’s extremely hard to build anything of value. It’s such a huge valuable piece to building any kind of technology product in this industry.”

But in the end, agents don’t go to a brokerage for the data, Papakyriacou says.

“An agent goes to a brokerage because they feel they will be provided with support, which happens to include good technology,” he says. “Our job is to make it easier for you to do everything you don’t care to be doing so you can be out selling. That is what attracts clients to agents.”

Read More Related to This Post

Comments

  • Kipp Blackburn says:

    Myself having been acquired by Compass through the acquisition of Conlon Real Estate I couldn’t be more pleased to hear that “once far-out concepts, like artificial intelligence, machine learning, geofencing and blockchain” now apply to our industry.

Join the conversation

New Subscribe

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.