eBook
Closing with Confidence: Empowering Buyers to Make Better Real Estate Decisions
Read this eBook to explore tools and resources that buyers can use to extend their reach, make smarter buying decisions, and maximize their real estate investments.
Introduction
As the Digital Age continues to introduce new platforms and competitors into the real estate industry, traditional buyers continue to face steeper odds every day.
Yet, with that influx of new competition comes opportunity: data and how buyers manage it is powering new tools and resources that buyers can use to extend their reach, make smarter buying decisions, and maximize their investments.
The arrival of PropTech signals a new methodology in the real estate buying and selling experience, driven by enhanced information and a proactive approach to real estate decision making.
At its core, PropTech aims to empower today’s buyers with the high-quality data they need to thrive, while helping avoid misinformed decisions in the process.
The data behind each deposit:
How data management is changing the real estate industry
How data management is changing the real estate industry
Until the last two decades, the real estate process typically followed a very traditional methodology.
Sellers sought out real estate agents to help them put their property on the market; buyers drove around from address to address or leaned on word-of-mouth to identify potential properties before turning to an agent for additional insight into the property and neighborhood. Those agents would then use their client’s provided criteria to filter through addresses using complex proprietary in-house systems. Eventually, the agent would unite the right buyer with the right seller, they would reach an agreement, and the process would repeat itself with new addresses and faces.
Today, the Digital Age has transformed that process into a data-driven, highly accessible exchange. Real estate websites showcase nearly every documented property — addressed or not — while sellers and agents have a litany of digital resources augmenting their sales and marketing efforts.
Buyers expect a 360-degree view of a property, including school boundary lines and neighborhood demographics, and real estate companies need to provide that experience. That means providing accurate and timely data to potential buyers to uphold the company’s reputation, ensure quality, and prevent the consequences of bad data.
For these modern real estate businesses, data is the competitive differentiator.
The cost of bad data
At a glance, bad data might be as little as a typo for a seller, but for a buyer, bad data could cripple a family’s financial standing.
Imagine a young family purchases their first home in a quiet, suburban neighborhood. There’s a top-rated school two blocks east, the streets are safe and well lit—it’s perfect. However, the data’s off, and to the family’s dismay, school boundary lines prevent their daughter from attending this top-rated school. They literally bought a house on the wrong side of the street.
If our hypothetical family had this information up front, they likely would have made a different decision.
The data tools that help differentiate the good data from the bad used to only be available to realtors, but today those same resources are publicly available to anyone with a working Wi-Fi connection. Buyers are informed and empowered; they’re using those property hunting websites for entertainment and educating themselves on what they really want in a property. Today’s consumers can now engage in different, smarter, more confident conversations with their realtor to help them find the ideal property.
Good data helps alleviate buyers’ remorse and prevents buyers from making ill-informed decisions.
The rise of the iBuyer
After the burst of the housing bubble in 2008, a saturated foreclosure market opened the real estate industry to new opportunities and trends.
Today, large real estate companies can buy and sell properties like stocks — grabbing one in a low period, holding for the market to shift, and selling when the tides change. This offers a great opportunity for sellers — not so much for smaller buyers. These larger real estate companies, iBuyers, cut through the time-consuming posting process by buying homes directly from their customers.
The swath of data at an iBuyer’s disposal has taught them how to leverage that information to buy and sell properties, and they are thriving. They’re outbuying and outselling traditional real estate companies and providing a convenience to their customers in the process.
But, as iBuyers gain more and more traction, that 13-15% will continue to shrink. Evaluation models will improve, algorithms will continue to learn, and the quality of data will rise. More highquality data equals better tools, better tools equal more, higher quality data, and so on, reducing the costs to the consumer with every cycle and improving the iBuyer’s appeal. In short, it’s hard out there for a traditional buyer.
1 https://collateralanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/CA-RESEARCH-iBuyers-A-new-choice-for-home-sellers-but-at-what-cost.pdf
13-15%
Despite the convenience, iBuyers are still costing their consumers money — about 13-15% of a home’s sale price, compared to an agent’s 5-7% 1
Laying the foundation:
How PropTech levels the buying market
How PropTech levels the buying market
While iBuyers certainly complicate the real estate market, the data revolution has opened new resources for smaller real estate buyers as well.
Property technology, or PropTech, empowers companies to take all of that available property data and use it to make informed real estate decisions. As we’ve established, today’s buyers know what they want, and they’re leveraging data to validate their decisions.
Say an iBuyer purchases a property, demolishes the existing structure, and rebuilds on the property. They made that decision based on information from different data models, from PropTech.
For customers, the challenge comes in knowing what to do with the data at their disposal.
The real estate data pyramid
With PropTech, that data is built into a pyramid of inputs that accounts for 99% of all property data:
It’s that last 1% that allows companies to leverage AI and machine learning.
Together, this pyramid allows buyers to explore:
Nearby schools
Tax rates
Crime statistics
Property lines
Neighborhood trends
“Consumers are empowered because they have more data but overwhelmed because they don’t know how to use the data to make decisions.”
Dan Adams SVP Data, Cloud Strategy, and Operations at PreciselyDoing more with more
This differentiator empowers companies to derive actionable insights from this data in a way that modern consumers can’t.
Historically, this process was messy and time consuming, and relied on sourcing data from multiple vendors bringing it all together — leaving plenty of room for error.
PropTech has made generating a one-stop solution for gathering and analyzing these huge swells of real estate data possible. With its extended data management capabilities, PropTech provides commercial and consumer buyers with the tools they need to better understand the real estate market, discern trends at an address-to-address level, and stay ahead of their competition.
“Everything extends from an address, whether commercial or residential”
Walter Baum Senior Account Representative at Precisely
For commercial buyers, precision and predictive methods represent the future of purchasing. The data available can empower organizations to predict what properties will enter the market, and when. If a company can accurately make these predictions, those leads are instantly more valuable. Regardless of the audience, commercial and consumer organizations, each aim to provide more customer-centric solutions.
For consumers and enterprises alike, PropTech solutions equip realtors to ease their buyers through the purchase and advance the homebuying process, like using sales trend data to help a seller determine if it’s a good time to sell their home or not.
“Realtors want to present the best properties to their customers to facilitate transactions, which require them to leverage user-friendly, intuitive technology solutions.”
Dan Adams SVP Data, Cloud Strategy, and Operations at Precisely
“It’s hard to build a real estate company without PropTech. That strong technology underpinning enables companies to better conduct business in the digital age.”
Walter Baum Senior Account Representative at PreciselyConclusion
As the available data continues to be built out further and further, it will be easier for companies to gather and supply the insights their customers need.
And so, the cycle continues. With PropTech propelling real estate organizations further into the future, improved data collection driving innovation, and more and more satisfied customers, the real estate industry is poised to evolve quickly and drastically in the coming years. With a boon of opportunity and innovation incoming, it will be the organizations that can use these tools to adapt that will thrive now and into the future.
“We will see a continued evolution of more and better data driving more and better decisions, which will drive an appetite for more and better data.”
Dan Adams SVP Data, Cloud Strategy, and Operations at Precisely