How a data-driven approach helps agents and brokers

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In today’s data-driven world, numbers are everything; they showcase our previous actions and indicate our future ones.

Think about how much data is gathered in the services we use on a day to day basis. Just by observing our search habits, Amazon is able to determine our age range, financial status, and what products we are drawn to. Every company in almost every industry is now recognizing the benefit and importance of collecting data and how it contributes to their growth. So, why not do the same in your real estate business?

A data-driven strategy in the realm of real estate businesses benefits everyone – the brokerage, coaches, and agents. Here’s how this approach can help across these three groups.

How brokers can make use of business data

For brokers, business data volumes are often large and complex. However, properly collated data can provide essential insights to help inform better business decisions and isolate areas for strategic growth and improvement.

For example, using information about local market trends, in conjunction with the financial state of their company, brokerages are able to better determine future business moves, as well as evaluate the success of the company’s organizational and payment structures. This practice can help significantly reduce the risk in making pivotal business decisions, and lower the cost of making routine ones.

Brokers can also more clearly analyze the performance of their marketing campaigns, determine which platforms are more effective, and analyze their current and future target markets.

By focusing your efforts on the activities with the highest financial return, brokers can both increase their market share by focusing on the right areas, and improve the effectiveness of their marketing budgets.

Data for real estate coaches

Utilizing data offers many opportunities to real estate coaches by keeping consultants informed on the detailed performance of individual agents.

Coaches are able to get in-depth views of agents’ performance, from the number of appointments they set per day, to the number of closings they achieve in a year, and everything in-between.

For example, an agent may not be obtaining enough leads through open houses, or not turning enough appointments into contracts, or maybe an agent is just too commission-focused. To the data-informed coach, this signals a need for skills development in particular, high-value areas.

Overall, data provides visual evidence of agents’ strengths and weaknesses and becomes a pivotal tool for coaches in guiding their agents’ career paths. With these insights, coaches can form more accurate, pinpoint development plans for their agents to address development areas aligned to the highest urgency or immediate return.

Further reading: Why your coach needs to know your numbers

Data-driven growth and real estate agents

Finally, the effective utilization of data can provide agents with valuable information that can improve performance, and ultimately the amount of commissions generated.

A data-driven work environment provides agents with the ability to track their history to see which business practices work for them, where they need improvement, and if they’re meeting their goals.

For example, an agent may be using ineffective methods to reach a target market, or they may find the majority of their listing appointments do not turn into contracts, signaling an area of improvement. Over time, an agent who is constantly aware of their performance across different techniques and practices can hone their craft to its highest potential.

Agents are also able to measure the average turnaround time per client, from initial appointment all the way through closing and the average commission value, thereby permitting them to make smarter financial predictions.

These types of forecasting options can help agents move from being an agent to an entrepreneur, as they can now make data-informed choices about where to invest financial and time resources into training and marketing.

Conclusion

The real estate industry revolves around numbers, and as we can see, there are countless benefits to implementing a data-driven strategy.

For brokerages, data analysis can drive smart decision making and help identify areas of high-value business development. Coaches can also take advantage of agent data, tailoring specific plans to develop an agent’s high and low-performance areas to their maximum potential. Finally, agents themselves can use data to make the transition from agent to business owner by not just improving their craft, but also identifying their own opportunities for marketing and training investment.

Read more: Top KPIs for growing your real estate brokerage

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