If you’ve ever wondered how predictive analytics scare up leads and what you’d have to do to convert those leads into clients, here’s a primer from Avi Gupta, CEO of big data lead generator SmartZip Analytics.
Gupta provided the information during Inman’s inaugural Select Live, a live-streamed real estate conference.
Lead generators that crunch data to identify potential sellers start by isolating the common attributes of consumers that have sold their homes in the last few years.
They find those common characteristics by studying hundreds or thousands of data points, including information on a homeowner, the loans they’ve taken out in the past, the homes around them, and the local population and job growth and school ratings of their neighborhood.
After uncovering the attributes of people who sell, the lead generators then home in on all the homeowners that exhibit those traits.
That can help a real estate agent narrow down their “farm” to the top 20 percent of people who live in that farm and are most likely to sell.
Lassoing that crop of prospective sellers lets a real estate agent market to an area with a much higher turnover and spend less money doing so than they would marketing to their original farm (though the agent will have spent money they wouldn’t have otherwise to lasso that crop of prospects).
Once you’ve pinpointed homeowners most likely to offload their homes soon, then it’s time to carpet-bomb them with offline and online marketing, including direct mail, Facebook ads and email.
At that point, you’ll be “all over them,” appearing in both their mailbox and on many websites that they visit, according to Gupta.
“What that does to [the potential seller] is it starts to make his mind think about maybe it is the right time [to sell],” Gupta said.
Real estate agents who leverage predictive analytics to get in front of potential clients may enjoy an advantage over slow adopters.
But:
After I tweeted that during the Select Live session, the event’s moderator, Vanessa Bergmark, general manager and partner at Red Oak Realty, was kind enough to pose the question to Gupta.
When all agents are using big data lead generators, he said, an agent’s success with leads sold by such companies will depend on an agent’s engagement strategy — and that’s more of an art than a science.
“What do you do when you actually connect with the homeowner” and how you “build that trusted brand” will decide what agents convert such leads into clients.
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