Faced with an enormous quantity of unstructured documents and resources, real estate agents find it difficult to understand customer preferences, which is crucial to gain a competitive advantage in the real estate market. However, the proper use of data mining techniques are now helping real estate brokers to learn more about their clients’ preferences and thereby increase sales. Nowadays a lot of these unstructured data is converted to a useful format that helps this process.
Traditionally, real estate agents collected customer information by spending time with clients, asking questions and learning about their preferences. Today, they are skipping such personal meetings and are relying on data mining software to collect information about potential clients. Customer’s buying behavior depends on multiple factors such as age, profession, income, family size, and so on. Information about these factors provides an insight into the purchasing power of the client and whether a loan would be required or not. In addition to this, analyzing data allows real estate agents to learn about matters such as:
* Their clients’ current home values * Current occupation and approximate income * Where they are residing * Marital status and family situations * Previous home showings * Time spent on searching for new properties
Major Sources of Data Capture
Data for real estate business can be collected from a number of sources such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, and so on. Mining public profiles in Facebook can provide information on age, income, their vacation plans, weekend activities, and much more. Twitter with its application processing interface (API) allows access to various tweets in real time. Likewise, every media platform seems to have some method for mining personal data, and they often share that information with interested outside companies. Anything posted publicly on social media portals, blogs, forums and other sites are a valuable source for mining information.
Using the Mined Data
Data mining can definitely be a valuable tool for both real estate companies and agents who navigate continually through the competitive real estate market. Once real estate agents have access to potential clients’ personal information, they can formulate strategies to make and build sales. For instance, it would work to their advantage to spend more time and energy on those who have a good income, have a home with a higher market value, and are looking for a new home. Once they identify clients with such attributes, they can send customized emails and marketing information to build rapport and provide them with pertinent information on their real estate requirements.
Data mining is a specialized field and best handled by experts. That’s why real estate agents are increasingly relying on professional outsourcing companies to understand consumer requirements and perform product analysis, and demand and supply analysis.
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