With Kylie Davis Corelogic
Part of the largest property data and analytics company in the world, Kylie Davis, Head of Content and Product Marketing at CoreLogic shares industry insights which will impact on real estate agents in 2017.
Residex, the trusted name in property research, has been acquired by CoreLogic. This marriage between CoreLogic and Residex creates a very powerful consumer tool as well as a useful lead generation apparatus for the real estate industry. Kylie says, “With Residex, we're rebuilding all of their consumer reports. They had an excellent series of reports that came out quarterly or on demand. We've merged the Residex database with the CoreLogic database to improve what we're pulling from. We'll be promoting and encouraging consumers and all buyers and sellers to be researching property before they make any big decisions a lot more."
Consumers are endlessly hungry for information on property. Kylie says, “I guess what we're seeing and what we saw in the consumer research is that you can't stop people looking up their property or looking up the property that they're interested in and doing their own research. That horse has bolted." Kylie believes that agents who facilitate consumers accessing as much information as possible will provide a point of difference. Using Residex reports, Kylie explains, an agent can say, "Look, this is what my data says. You don't have to believe it. Here's what it says. You're more than welcome to have a copy of it. If you want to do some more research or some more homework on your own, I can recommend this website and here's a code for you to download a cheaper report or to access something for free."
Research indicates that consumers will look at a staggering 200 data points before they actually contact an agent. Kylie says, “That might be look at the bedrooms, look at the kitchen, look at the photos, go into stuff in more detail. What happens when they have the information that the agent gave them independently verified by their own searches, is that immediately reflects back well onto the agent and becomes kind of like an echo chamber of trust and sort of says, 'Well, you know he wasn't lying to me. He or she told me the truth. All these other stats are kind of in the same ballpark or marrying to paint the same picture'.
In this day and age, consumers want to trust people they work with; they want authenticity. Therefore, facilitating the acquisition of knowledge for consumers of market trends of top suburbs for capital growth and providing prediction reports which will help them buy, sell or invest with confidence in fact facilitates conversion of leads.
It seems ridiculous because it seems so obvious but in 2017, consumers are looking for individuals and brands that they truly believe to be authentic, who they can trust. Kylie says, “Consumers feel at the moment that they're not sure if they should (trust). Most of the experiences that they have had indicate that probably, as a buyer especially, they shouldn't. They should be on their guard. That's actually quite emotionally exhausting to have to constantly be on your guard to expect the people who are supposed to help you to not be telling you the truth all the time. That adds to the stress of buying and selling which then in turn reflects poorly on the industry as you're actually not solving pain points."
She continues, “We're moving completely away from this idea that real estate is just a transaction. It's not. It's not about product. It's not about a transaction. It's not about just buying or selling. It's not about the agent just playing in that buy/sell negotiate space. It's about a relationship. It's about trust. It's about that human contact and empathy. It's about guidance and support. If agents focus on that, they won't be disintermediated because you can't disintermediate human connection. I heard a great quote that 'in the future, efficiency will be for the bots, but relationships will always be for the humans' because that's what we excel at as people. In fact, the more work that the technology can do for us to get rid of all of that busy stuff, the better and the more quality relationships we can have with more people hopefully."
Finally, Kylie has some thoughts of how to utilise the sea of information that is now available. She says, “There are a lot of companies out there that do data and a lot of agents have their own data points. Where we feel that we have real value is around that whole concept of smart growth. It's about how the data becomes the analytics and the analytics become the insight and then the insights help you understand, 'Oh, so this is what I do next. Now that I know this, obviously I have to do this'. I think in the past a lot of data companies (and we're probably one of them) would give our clients a lot of data."
CoreLogic want to assist clients to use data to help them grow from where they are right now. She says, “What we are doing increasingly is getting behind the, 'Here's all the stuff that you need to know, but actually that means that you now do this and this is how you do it'. Guiding our clients to grow their business using our insights and analytics so that they're making decisions based on reality and facts as opposed to just what kind of feels right, but also at the same time being able to align what feels right to the data so that they know they're going in the right direction."