The real estate industry is becoming more data rich and data deep every day. Data analytics, AI and machine learning, as we’ve already seen with suggestions Netflix or Spotify (and others) make to us about what we might like to view or hear, predictive analytics dedicated to real estate has the promise of delivering better leads, earlier access to future inventory, lower costs, less risk and bigger profits.
Housing Canary, a provider of valuation and appraisal solutions, has written, “Everything is now on the table, from social activity to current headline news to the types of products people buy and when they buy them.”
Companies such as SmartZip Analytics are now able to predict when a homeowner is likely to sell her/his home just by looking at various combinations of triggers (clicks, links, tracking pixels, surveys, cell phone locators, credit card purchases, loyalty programs, etc.) that point to hyper-local predictive models for every neighborhood in the country.
Today, there is an average per capita rate of one data-driven interaction per second, every second, every day. I’ll repeat that…one data driven interaction per second, every second, every day. This interaction rate is expected to increase 20-fold over the next 10 years.
Interactions of this “productivity” data come from security cameras, smart meters, chip cards, RFID readers, fueling stations, smart infrastructure, machine tools, vending machines, cars/boats/trains/planes/busses, casinos and digital signals, according to Housing Canary.
The huge huge premium is on mobile access and real-time responses as more and more people around the world “interact” with the world solely through their mobile devices. It’s anticipated by 2025, “connected” users (all of us) will number 75% of the world’s population.
Clearly, it is incumbent upon you as real estate agents/brokers to choose your software vendors with an eye to managing privacy and security risks. If it took just 20 minutes for an 11-year-old boy in the Midwest to hack into Florida’s voting system (as really happened this week), you need to protect your clients and your business with vendors that can do much more than simply procure data. You need software vendors who are leaders and partners in utilizing data responsibly.
Security codes, firewalls and passwords are no joke. And since buying/selling a home is often the most expensive venture your clients undertake in their lifetimes, make sure that you and you clients are protected while your software is predicting their every and next moves, often before they “know” what they’re doing and when they’ll be doing it.
