Going by the predictions, the global stock of institutional-grade real estate may grow from $29 trillion in 2012 to $69 trillion in 2030. To add to that by 2050 the world’s population will be up by more than 50% vastly affecting the real estate demand. This massive growth calls for unprecedented opportunities for realtors along with higher risks. Real estate is an emerging economy; the changing trends require the realtors to keep up with the technology.
Keeping property listings updated and accurate in real-time is the biggest challenge for realtors today. Whether it is residential, commercial, or industrial property; property listings need to evoke emotions along with giving hard facts. A potential customer wants to see and feel the product through enhanced images and virtual reality viewings. It is through excellent product descriptions, campaigns, social media, etc. that real estate brokers can grab the attention of potential customers.
A high-performing property listing requires automated web scraping to capture property data, followed by cleansing and enrichment, property image and video enhancement, and so on and so forth. However, as a thriving realtor – your hands are full, and the tasks require expert intervention.
Is Outsourcing property listing a smart option?
Definitely. Outsourcing your back-office tasks and projects beyond your core areas is a smart move. It saves you time and helps you focus more on your revenue-generating activities. You get access to a skilled and scalable workforce and save on hiring, training, and infrastructure costs. The story will walk you through the advantages of outsourcing property listing management.
How is outsourcing beneficial to realtors?
Accurate listing – Property listings are dynamic requiring constant updates. Gathering dynamic data on changing valuation, appraisal, mortgage, lending rate, demographics, historical data, crime reports, markets, and hospitals, etc. requires resources and expertise. List verification and validation form an important part of property listing management. Data authentication for dead and expired listings is a labor and time-intensive task.
Outsourcing gets you access to technology-enabled data gathering solutions like web scraping, crawlers, rules, and bots. Specific crawl schedules get data from across the globe in real-time. Efficient comparison of prices through price scraping will get you access to useful real estate pricing information. Validated and verified data ensures accurate and real-time data on the property listing sites.
Quick transactions – Back-office work like real estate document processing of mortgage, loans, agreements, lease, deeds, title transfer, etc. are time and labor-intensive. Studies have shown that traditional document management consumes 20% of the total operational cost. Improved and automated processes lead to quick, accurate, and structured property listings which help in quick transactions.
Automation and technology-driven processes lead to enhanced operational efficiencies. Outsourcing real estate document processing suffices the need for automating your processes. A simple macro or RPA can convert unstructured data into structured and relevant information. RPA enhanced with cognitive or artificial intelligence (CI/AI) further improves the speed at which transactions are processed and made easy to access.
Efficient data capture – Capturing data from structured and unstructured real estate documents like title, deeds, foreclosures, agreements, illegible handwritten annotations is challenging. Often capturing data from low-resolution scanned documents like agreement, title, or deed copies get difficult. Manual processing is prone to errors. Using advanced technology, relevant data is captured efficiently keeping the listings accurate and updated.
Third-party property listing service providers equipped with intelligent data capture tools like OCR, RPA, etc. backed with RPA helps to automate voluminous data capture in large volumes. Bots programmed with ML algorithms and AI-based solutions are being used effectively for real estate data capture. As per PWC AI-based data management will lead to 11.3 percent growth in GDP by 2030.
Effective virtual viewing – Virtual reality is a game-changer in the real estate industry. According to a survey by the National Association of Realtors – 44% of clients go to the Internet to look for properties. Technology advancement has empowered customers to view and feel the property by just flipping the finger. Videos are most effective in generating leads. According to published stats, social videos generate 1200% more shares than images and texts and drive a 157% increase in organic traffic.
3D walkthroughs of property can give the feel of property to customers without having to step out. Outsourcing to experts helps realtors create virtual staging, guided visits, 360-degree videos, etc. generating higher leads.
Efficient marketing automation – Listings need marketing. This is altogether a separate field with a separate skill-set; and it is not possible for a realtor to invest time, energy, and resources in honing these skills.
Outsourcing to social media and marketing specialists will ensure the required visibility to your listings through marketing automation. Marketing automation is not only about email campaigns; leads are identified and segmented, offers are automated, social media engagement is enhanced, and much more. Automation is the key in real estate marketing saving your time and targeting effectively.
Conclusion
Today a realtor’s role is not limited to just buying and selling. It involves multi-dimensional work like database management, prospecting, data gathering, data capturing, cleansing and enriching data, creating videos campaigns, social media marketing, and much more. All are sort of dependent on each other. Investing in skilled resources, infrastructure, and emerging technologies may not be a prudent decision. Outsourcing property listing management to a skilled and scalable workforce leaves you free to focus on your core activities and proves to be beneficial for you to make profitable growth.
Snehal Joshi heads the business process management vertical at HabileData, the company offering quality data processing services to companies worldwide. He has successfully built, deployed and managed more than 40 data processing management, research and analysis and image intelligence solutions in the last 20 years. Snehal leverages innovation, smart tooling and digitalization across functions and domains to empower organizations to unlock the potential of their business data.
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