Big Data Solves the Lead Quality and CRM Problems in Real Estate

Remember years ago when conferences had sessions and tracks on big data mashups? It was a headliner topic that led to a bunch of companies proclaiming that their predictive analytic algorithms could tell Realtors when a consumer had a high propensity to buy or sell. Investors backed these companies with millions. Also, agents and brokers jumped in to find better, faster, and cheaper methods for finding customers. It failed, and they are all gone now. As it turns out, those people who were in a good position to buy or sell were not actually as likely to buy or sell as the data suggested – but big data is still around, and at least one mashup is making remarkable strides.

Last week, WAV Group was given an update from Darr Aley, co-founder of Aidentified, to gain an understanding about the status of big data and mashups. Aidentified refers to their mashup as an identity graph. Today, the data market is divided into consumer data (Experian, etc.) and professional data (ZoomInfo, etc.). Aidentified's identity graph combines those two and adds a relationship mapping cloud (social media connections) along with events (when their customer has an IPO, investment received, stock transaction, management changes, news mentions, etc.).

Lead Quality Improvement

Agents and brokers spend a lot of marketing dollars on digital lead generation. The goal is to get a consumer to raise their hand by providing their name, email, and phone number on a lead form. At best, lead generation companies use big data to validate that the phone number and email address is valid. Other than that, agents get very little information about the lead.

To improve the value of a lead, Aidentified uses a process called "match and append." The integration with Zillow will add more than 150 possible attributes to the lead – household information, spouse information, wealth category, income category, etc. On top of that, Aidentified will tell the agent how they are connected to them (social media – first- or second-level connection).

A Compass agent received a Zillow lead on a $15 million property. The agent was able to see that the lead was a teacher, but also that her husband was an executive at Apple and that they currently live in a $10 million home. This completely changes the picture.

CRM Problem

There is a numbers game to CRMs. It is a sales funnel. A new term coined by leading real estate coach Tom Ferry is "clients under management." In the CRM game, contacts matter. The more quality contacts that an agent has, the more transactions and referrals the agent will get. Five-hundred high quality contacts that are routinely worked by the agent should yield about 12 transactions a year.

On the surface, the math seems straightforward, but when you dig in deeper you find that most agents' CRMs are a leaky bucket. The leaky bucket is caused by people moving (ouch – lost deal and direct mail bounces), changing phone numbers, or changing email addresses (email bounces). But there is more than that. Most agents do not have spouse information, do not know about the household's career or wealth, etc.

A different Compass agent was notified about the news announcement that Charles Schwab was moving their corporate headquarters out of San Francisco to North Texas. He used Aidentified to find all 17 executives at Schwab and started marketing to them, securing two very high-end listings and referrals to a Compass agent in Texas.

To view the original article, visit the WAV Group blog.