December 26, 2011–Real estate is an endless shell game of facts and figures, data and statistics, and whims. Lots of customer whims. So it goes to reason that agents helping buy and sell homes could benefit from the power of unstructured big data software. We discovered one such prediction in a recent Market Watch story, “PeopleCube Predicts Companies will Strive to Maximize Efficient Utilization of Real Estate and Workspace in 2012.”
The most intriguing prediction comes midway through the article. It states: “Another business trend that PeopleCube foresees for 2012 is the evolution of interactive reporting. Instead of producing copious static reports to get a handle on real-estate utilization trends, companies will rely on comprehensive business intelligence systems. Dashboards and interactive visualizations will ease the process of identifying trends and inefficiencies, both companywide and at individual locations.”
This prediction makes perfect sense and we see realtors around the globe fighting poor home sales with this technology. However, it seems a lot of professionals haven’t yet gotten the message. For example, a recent article said: “The National Association of Realtors says it overestimated home sales by more than 14 percent since 2007 because an adjustment that the trade group makes to data.” Yikes, that’s a huge miscue and one that likely could have been caught or never occurred at all if real estate analytics were in use.
It doesn’t stop there. Because the real estate world is so slow to adapt, they are missing out on potential sales to none other than their own clients. According to C2ER, “The real-estate industry, for example, trades on information such as privileged access to transaction data and tightly held network of buyers and sellers. In recent years, however, online specialists in real-estate data and analytics have started to bypass agents, permitting buyers and sellers to exchange perspectives on the value of properties and creating parallel sources for real-estate data.”
Clearly, the world is set up for real estate analytics to take off. However, a realtor’s worst enemy might be themselves. This is a great example of an entire industry missing the boat because they are too hesitant. Let it be a lesson to others.
Patrick Roland
Image courtesy of Morguefile: http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/57485
[...] story, our feature this week, “Real Estate Market Missing Out on Analytic Help” detailed the many ways in which the housing market could be aided by analytics, but is not [...]