Why, as a real estate professional, should you care? Simply put, with reliable predictive analytics, you can better target the most likely buyers and sellers in your market and have better insight into which homes and neighborhoods are likely to produce transactions. In other words, you can spend less time marketing, have better conversations as a result of the marketing you do, and explode your overall conversion rates.

• Data-driven: Predictive analytics are based on data. As we get more data points about consumers and observe the results of our earliest predictions, we can better understand where our algorithms are accurate and where they need to be tweaked. The result: Predictive analytics marketing is only going to get better as time goes on.
• Listing-focused: A lot of real estate marketing grabs the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to leads: buyer leads. Though there’s nothing wrong with working buyer leads, we all know that there’s only so far you can scale your business as a buyer’s agent. Since a predictive analytics marketing approach is very listing-focused, you have the opportunity to grow your business further and faster.
• Exciting for investors: For those of us working with real estate investors (or who are investors ourselves), we know that real opportunity for profit is tied directly to timing. With predictive analytics, investors may be able to identify opportunities earlier and more often, thereby increasing their profits on each transaction and outpacing their competitors.

Predictive Analytics in Real Estate: A 60-Second Explanation

Need a quick refresher on how predictive analytics actually work in the real estate industry? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Watch this video to get up to speed.

How Predictive Analytics Real Estate Marketing Will Get You Twice as Many Listings

According to a case study conducted by AccuData, direct mail marketing driven by predictive analytics saw response rates more than double that of marketing without algorithmic smart targeting. Why?

It all has to do with conversion rates. When you use predictive analytics in your real estate marketing, you’re focusing your message on people and property that are more likely to produce transactions.

Armed with data on the most likely buyers, sellers, and productive neighborhoods, you can laser-focus your efforts where your opportunities truly lie, rather than spending your time and resources blanketing neighborhoods and prospects that may not be interested in your marketing.

How Predictive Analytics Will Slash Your Marketing Budget (& Still Make You Money)

Agents using the traditional scattershot approach to real estate marketing need to hit a large swath of prospects with their messages to be profitable. Since their conversion rates are so low (often less than 4%), they need to deliver hundreds or even thousands of marketing emails, texts, postcards, and more every single week.

Sure, this approach can be profitable, but it requires a hefty investment just to get people into the top of your funnel, and it can be very labor-intensive. With predictive analytics, your marketing outreach is focused on the most likely buyers and sellers in your area. This approach drastically decreases the amount of cold, initial outreach you need to do—saving you time, money, and effort.

THE BOTTOM LINE: This targeted real estate marketing lets you reallocate many of your top-of-funnel marketing resources toward generating referrals and maintaining relationships with your existing sphere of influence. You’ll increase your overall business strength and diversify your lead sources. Predictive analytics aren’t just good for new clients—they’re good for your business as a whole.

OK, So What’s the Catch?

It’s important to note that while predictive analytics are likely to produce quick wins here and there, the typical nurturing time on a predictive analytic-powered lead is relatively long—sometimes as much as 18 months. This makes sense, since you’re establishing a relationship with these leads in their curious-about-the-market stage, and sometimes even earlier.

However, since most of us are in this business for the long haul and are looking for career-sustaining strategies, this only means that you’ve got to add patience and consistency to your recipe for success when working with predictive analytics.

The Close Recommends Smartzip

If you’re sold on predictive analytics as part of your marketing strategy, we suggest checking out Smartzip as a data provider. Smartzip provides all the data you need to craft targeted marketing campaigns, a solid CRM for managing your leads, plus the ability to sync with just about every real estate CRM on the market. You’ll also gain a host of other related options you can use to power your business.

What Realtors Get When They Join Smartzip

When you become a Smartzip agent, you immediately get access to the Smartzip CRM, which is prepopulated with the contact profiles of buyers and sellers identified by the Smartzip algorithm as highly likely to become active in the next 18 months. Each of these lead profiles includes details about residents and the homes they own (courtesy of tax records and MLS data). You’ll gain access to their contact information, including phone numbers, email addresses, social media profiles, and more.

Other Smartzip Tools Worth Checking Out

When you join Smartzip, you can opt in to their Smart Targeting tool, which can automate your marketing to more effectively cash in on the leads Smartzip generates for you. You also can opt in to their Reach150 program, designed to solicit and manage online reviews.

Their Sphere program applies predictive analytics principles to your personal sphere of influence to give you a better chance of cashing in on referrals and repeat business. It can help you prioritize your relationship nurturing.

Each of these programs comes at an additional cost, but for agents who can use the tools effectively, they provide a solid return on your investment.

Smartzip Cost

Smartzip’s cost depends on the median property value in your market plus the amount of Smart Data you’re investing in. The minimum monthly spend with Smartzip is $350. Most agents report their typical monthly spend is about $1,000.

Visit Smartzip

Learn More

Want to learn more about Smartzip? The Close did a deep-dive review of Smartzip. Check it out to learn about features, pricing, and more. If you’ve had success using Smartzip in your part of the country, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Looking for more real estate marketing advice and strategy? Check out Managing Editor Emile L’Eplatennier’s real estate marketing plan template every agent needs, and join us in our Facebook Mastermind group, where you can learn from weekly conversations about how realtors, teams, and brokerages can more effectively market their services and expertise to their local community.

The post Predictive Analytics: How to Get More Listings With Less Marketing appeared first on The Close.

Offrs leverages the power of big data, analyzes hundreds of data points per property, and runs them through a proprietary algorithm to give you a list of potential home sellers in your chosen market.

But Offrs is more than just a list of names and addresses that show up in your inbox. Offrs provides property data, consumer data, and demographic data, all delivered in a powerful dashboard to prioritize these leads and track your progress with them.

You’ll get a wide variety of specialized leads, including expired listings, FSBOs, and even a segment that focuses on potential buyers near you. Offrs also provides specialized marketing options to reach each of these lead segments through their proprietary tools called Smart Apps.

In this article, we’ll further break down what Offrs does, how they do it, how much they cost, and ultimately, we’ll help you decide whether Offrs is right for you and your business.

Visit Offrs

What Are Predictive Analytics & Why Should You Care?

“Predictive analytics” is the study of big data for the purpose of understanding what’s going to happen next. This field of study is exploding across the consumer landscape, and arguably, there’s no more lucrative opportunity for its application than in real estate.

The goal of predictive analytics is to figure out which behaviors might indicate someone’s intent to buy or sell a home, so that real estate agents like you can start marketing to those buyers and sellers first. Predictive analytics can give you a competitive advantage over the other real estate pros in your market.

Sounds like a good idea, right? The folks at Offrs thought so, too.

How Much Does Offrs Cost?

The cost of Offrs depends on market-driven factors—primarily, the typical home price and the number of homes in the territory. It’s similar to the way that Zillow Premier Agent prices their territories. According to the Offrs website, the typical starting price for Smart Data, which is the base Offrs product, is $200 to $500 per territory, per month.

There can be additional monthly costs if you also choose to subscribe to one or more of the Offrs premium Smart Apps. As I mentioned, these help you to leverage the Offrs automated marketing and follow-up tools to best connect with the leads generated by their Smart Data. After all, leads are only useful if you pursue them consistently and with impact.

What Services Does Offrs Provide?

In short, Offrs provides two categories of services: the results of their proprietary algorithm (Smart Data) and vehicles for marketing to the leads that have been identified (Smart Apps).

Let’s take a closer look at each of these categories.

Smart Data: A Closer Look

All Offrs products build upon their base product, Smart Data. When you become an Offrs customer, you sign up for Smart Data in a particular territory. These are usually delineated by a ZIP code or part of a ZIP code, depending on the number of homes in the area. You can sign up for multiple territories, as well; a single user can sign up for as many as 10.

Here’s the cool part. Offrs is an exclusive leads platform, so Offrs provides data to only one agent per territory. Once you’re the official Offrs agent for your territory, you get exclusive access to the results of the proprietary Offrs algorithm.

For example, there are homes that Offrs predicts are likely candidates for sale, updated daily. These results are populated on the Offrs Smart Data dashboard, providing you with names, contact information, property address and information, as well as property history and sold data.

You can export this data, plug it into a customer relationship manager (CRM), and start your own independent marketing campaigns with it, or you can reach into the next part of the Offrs toolkit, Smart Apps.

Smart Apps: A Closer Look

With the Offrs Smart Apps, you can do all sorts of automated marketing to the property owners that Smart Data identifies so that your first live interactions happen with prospects that have already engaged with your message and are now hot leads.

Specific add-ons also help you to connect with potential homebuyers. Using Smart Apps, you can also drill down further into your community to identify other valuable lead types, like Expireds, FSBOs, Mortgage Leads, and more.

The Offrs toolkit delivers 19 different Smart Apps that all accentuate the value of the insights provided by Smart Data. Here are some of our favorite Smart Apps, a little bit about what they do, and how much they cost.

Our Favorite Free Smart Apps

We gathered a handful of the Smart Apps available for free to anyone who is a Smart Data customer. We found these to be very beneficial tools to help you get the most out of your smart analytics data. Free Offrs apps include:

• Launchpad: This functions as the operating system for Smart Data and all your apps. It’s where you’ll start to complete just about any data or marketing task within Offrs.
• Smart Sites: These are landing pages you can create to attract lead attention. The most popular of the Offrs Smart Sites is a home valuation page, often used in conjunction with some of their paid apps to provide value and generate interaction with the sellers in your territory.
• Template Builder: Most of the paid apps use templated content delivered regularly to reach your target prospects. The templates that come with the premium apps are great, but if you want to build your own templates, you’ll need this free app to create custom content.

Our Favorite Paid Smart Apps

Seller Signal Leads: $50 per Month

FSBO Leads: $50 per Month

Email Autopilot: $25 Setup Fee, $10 per Month, 1 Cent per Email Sent

Direct Mail Autopilot: $50 Setup Fee, $50 per Month, 70 Cents per Postcard Sent

Voicemail Autopilot: $10 per Month, 1 Cent per Voicemail Sent

Is Offrs Right for Your Business?

Offrs can be a powerful tool for maintaining and growing your real estate business. Still, to feel good about making a recommendation for you to get started with them, we suggest you have a handful of things already working in your favor.

To get The Close endorsement for Offrs, here’s what you need:

• A healthy budget: Offrs is not the cheapest product on the market. We happen to believe that you often get what you pay for, so this isn’t necessarily a negative. But if you don’t have the budget to invest to really make this tool work, you should wait. Typical Offrs territories run about $350 a month, and with a couple of the paid Smart Apps, you could easily spend $500 a month with Offrs.
• The ability to respond quickly: Offrs leads are a bit of a novelty because the algorithm has identified them as people likely to do business in the next year (making them a hot lead). However, they haven’t yet raised their hand to request information from you (making them a hot/cold lead?).

If your Smart Data shows someone is a likely sale candidate, and your automated prospect marketing generates a response from them, you need to get back to them right away. Success on Offrs means you can’t let your leads sit. Speed-to-lead is critical here.

• A long-term view of success: Let’s assume that you’re spending $500 a month with Offrs, or $6,000 a year. Assuming a 3% commission, it would only take a single sale of a $200,000 home to pay for that annual investment. Depending on the typical home price in your market, this should be pretty easy to get.

But, since this is a prospecting platform that primarily targets homeowners who haven’t proactively requested help yet, your short-term conversion rates may fluctuate. If you get easily discouraged by no sales in a month, two months, or even three months, this might not be the best option for you.

On the other hand, if you have a dedicated budget, a strategy for quick follow-up, and the ability to think long term, Offrs is a great way to power up your real estate prospecting and establish yourself as a top producer in your market.

Try Offrs

More Real Estate Prospecting Resources

Looking for other ways to improve your real estate prospecting? Start with our guide, “15 Clever Real Estate Prospecting Ideas to Boost Your GCI.” If you’re looking for tools to help with your phone prospecting, we’ve got a great list of cold calling scripts and tips you need to read. Got a specific question? Drop a comment below, or ask it in our Facebook Group: The Close Real Estate Agents Mastermind Group.

The post Offrs Review: Are AI & Predictive Analytics the Future of Real Estate? appeared first on The Close.

Predictive analytics apps like SmartZip claim they are the best use of your resources. But are they really?

In this article, we’ll talk a little bit about how predictive analytics work, how SmartZip harnesses them to produce results, how much it costs, and ultimately, whether it’s the right tool for you and your business.

Wait, What the Heck Is Predictive Analytics?

I bet you’ve heard this term before, but are probably a little hazy on what it actually means. So we’re all on the same page, here’s a basic definition:

Predictive analytics use data, both current and historic, to make better predictions about what will happen in the future.

When it comes to real estate, predictive analytics are based on the past and present behavior of homebuyers and sellers, as well as the behavior of the market, so we can better understand which homes and homesellers are the best targets for marketing.

Why Predictive Analytics Matter

OK, so now that we know what predictive analytics are, why are they important to the future of real estate marketing? Here’s an example:

I’m sure there are neighborhoods in your market that are very popular with first-time homebuyers. A typical first-time buyer stays in their property five to seven years, so a sale date of six years ago could be used to predict that a sale in the next 12 to 18 months is likely. This is an example of market behavior, and a data point that can be used to predict future behavior.

But using a single data point like length of ownership is just the tip of the iceberg. Sophisticated predictive analytics models incorporate dozens (if not hundreds) of data points to create a detailed picture of a property and a consumer, allowing for a much more accurate guess as to what will happen next. That’s where SmartZip comes in.

Real estate agents who can use predictive analytics to correctly identify likely candidates for sale will have an advantage over those who don’t since they can focus their marketing efforts on these homeowners instead of blanketing an area with a message that, for most homeowners, will fall on deaf ears.

How Does SmartZip Use Predictive Analytics?

SmartZip uses a proprietary algorithm that aggregates data from more than 25 sources to generate a list of the homes most likely to be listed for sale in a particular market. Some of the data sources that SmartZip uses to feed this algorithm include:

• Property data: Your MLS is ripe with information, including hundreds of data points like number of bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, and year built. The MLS also houses sold data like the last time the property was sold, whether it was listed and expired or withdrawn, and other important information about the property’s history in the market. This data helps SmartZip identify trends like typical turnover rates for neighborhoods, popular architectural styles, and other factors that might affect demand.
• Behavioral data: Spending a lot of time on Zillow lately? For a real estate-focused predictive analytics model, that is a behavioral indicator that you’re likely to list your home in the coming year. Companies like Google, Facebook, and even your cell phone service provider or your home internet service provider catalog almost all of your behavior online, then package and sell that data to companies so that they can better serve advertisements to you, or to analytics companies (like SmartZip) for further study.
• Consumer data: Every time you swipe your card at the checkout, those purchases are logged by your credit card company, and that data is packaged and sold to companies who are trying to better understand what your purchases today will say about your purchases (and behavior) in the future. For instance, if you’re at Home Depot every weekend buying supplies for a bathroom remodel, this could mean you’re finishing projects necessary to getting a higher price when selling your home.
• Demographic data: Are you a parent of a child about to graduate high school? Maybe the last of your kids has launched their lives and you find yourself with a house bigger than you need? These sorts of life events are demographic indicators that can suggest a move might be imminent.

On their own, each of these categories provides an interesting insight into your life. But combined together and fed into the SmartZip algorithm, SmartZip users have a powerful tool to separate the homes and property owners who are the most likely candidates for sale in the coming months.

How Much Does SmartZip Cost?

SmartZip’s pricing varies depending on two factors: median property value and the size of the market you purchase. The minimum monthly cost with SmartZip is about $350; many agents report their typical SmartZip spend is about $1,000 a month. SmartZip also requires a 12-month contract to get started.

This entry cost gets real estate agents access to Smart Data, the results of the SmartZip algorithm for the market you’re working in. With Smart Data, you get a list of the most likely properties to list for sale in the markets you’ve opted into, including lead profiles with contact information like phone numbers and social media accounts for each of the homeowners who will allow you to target marketing you create specifically to them. However, Smart Data isn’t the only tool offered by SmartZip.

When I Sign Up With SmartZip, What Do I Get?

After signing on the dotted line with SmartZip, Realtors will get access to the SmartZip CRM that, unlike a traditional CRM, comes populated (and is constantly updated) with the contact profiles of those the algorithm has identified as “high likelihood sellers.” These profiles include details about the homeowner’s property (square footage, bedroom and bathroom count, etc), tax records (date the home was last sold, taxable value changes, estimated equity, etc), and of course contact information (name, phone number, mailing address, even links to social media profiles). 

If it’s available, the profiles also get populated with demographic data too; things like age, income level, education, and even occupation. 

Can I Link SmartZip Data with an Existing CRM?

Yes, this is possible, but there’s a good reason to consider using the SmartZip CRM, even if it means you’ll have two platforms active. 

When you get a SmartZip lead, you aren’t just getting the basic contact information you’d get from another lead source; you’re getting a highly populated lead profile with a ton of extra data. Most CRMs don’t have the capability to set up the high number of custom fields necessary to accommodate all this data, and moreover, are most likely not equipped to handle the sort of integration that SmartZip offers to get all the data in the right place. 

Long story short, the juice may not be worth the squeeze here, especially when the SmartZip backend CRM is so easy to use. 

Our suggestion is to use the SmartZip CRM for their leads, and if you’re using another CRM, once you make contact with a SmartZip lead and start a relationship with them, migrate the data you can use over to your primary CRM.

What Other Tools Does SmartZip Offer Real Estate Agents?

In addition to Smart Data, there are a few other tools real estate agents can add to SmartZip. These tools have an additional cost (again, determined by the median sale price and the number of homes in your market), but provide significant benefits for agents who want to take their use of Smart Data to the next level. These optional tools are:

Smart Targeting

This automated marketing solution takes Smart Data and builds marketing campaigns across multiple platforms to reach your targeted leads. The SmartZip-identified potential sellers will see marketing from you in the form of direct mail (postcards and letters), email marketing, and ads across social media and Google, driving traffic to lead converting branded landing pages.

Remember, the Smart Data includes a lead profile with things like social media accounts and contact information including phone numbers and email addresses, on top of mailing address data, so utilizing the Smart Targeting service takes all the guesswork out of assembling the marketing to reach your prospects.

Real estate agents are given the option to review every piece of marketing before it goes out too, so you can rest assured any message being sent will be in line with your branding and business model.

Reach 150

If you want to further augment the marketing value of Smart Targeting, Reach 150 is a unique and effective way to do it. With Reach 150, SmartZip uses an automated process of Smart Targeting to reach out to past clients, specifically those who haven’t given you a review. They’ll also send communication to current clients after their purchase or sale has closed to solicit a review.

Why go after reviews? So that they can take these reviews and plug them into the Smart Targeting system, using the positive feedback you receive from your clients to build additional ads to be served to your potential clients at just the right time, adding an element of social proof to your marketing.

This clever system is great for active real estate agents with a high-closing volume, but also works well for newer agents because you have a chance to pick and choose exactly the reviews you want to highlight on your personalized review website. Even if you only have a couple of reviews, the Smart Targeting tool can use them to build ads and send traffic to your lead converting landing pages.

Sphere

For successful real estate agents, upwards of 30% of your annual business comes from your sphere of influence. But, if you’re like most Close readers, the Contacts app on your phone is jammed with so many people it’s hard to know exactly who you should be reaching out to and which referral source you should be nurturing.

This is why SmartZip took their predictive analytics algorithm and applied it to your contact database. Just upload your contact list and SmartZip will identify which of the people you know are most likely to list their home for sale in the next year or so.

With this information, you can be a lot more strategic about who you reach out to with regular touches, prioritizing the most important relationships first.

SmartZip also offers other back-end tools like a basic customer relationship management (CRM) tool, but the functionality there is relatively basic. If you’re using Smart Targeting, much of the marketing automation connects back to this CRM, so it’s a required part of the ecosystem. But, SmartZip does easily integrate with just about every major CRM on the market, so you can still use a system you’re already familiar with.

SmartZip Drawbacks

We’ll be honest: We’re a big fan of this technology and the advantages it gives agents who can effectively employ it. But it’s not perfect.

For starters, SmartZip doesn’t offer exclusive leads. In other words, if another real estate agent in your market is also a SmartZip user, both of you are vying for the same property owners the algorithm has identified.

Secondly, as we mentioned before, SmartZip is pretty pricey, especially since they require a commitment of at least 12 months to get started. If you’re just getting started in the real estate business, you may not have an operating budget that would allow for this sort of annual expenditure.

Lastly, as a product of the way the SmartZip system works, the leads here take longer to nurture. Remember, you’re reaching out to homeowners and establishing relationships with them before they have even decided they want to put their home on the market, so the time it takes to convert them to listing clients is going to be greater. If your initial follow-up and sustained lead nurturing skills aren’t up to snuff, this is going to be a challenge.

Is SmartZip Right for You?

So, now you know the ins and outs of SmartZip. The question remains, “Is SmartZip right for you?”

Yes, if:

• You have a great follow-up and nurturing strategy that can take the leads you connect with and carry them the rest of the way down the funnel.
• You have vision and strategy for the long term. Remember, SmartZip isn’t an overnight success tool; you need to plan to keep sellers in the “lead” category for months or even years before they convert.
• You have the budget to invest even without early-stage returns.

No, if:

• You’re looking for quick win, one-off leads that are ready to convert to listings very quickly (if this is you, give Inbox Real Estate Leads a try).
• You’ve got a small (or non-existent) monthly budget for lead generation (if this is you, try a prospecting tool like REDX).
• Your business plan hasn’t been fully developed, making it difficult to commit to a long-term strategy (if this is you, check out our article on developing a real estate business plan).
• Your lead nurturing strategy is weak.

So…Is SmartZip the Future of Real Estate Prospecting?

There’s no doubt about it; predictive analytics are going to play an increasingly important role in real estate marketing in the months and years ahead. Real estate buyers and sellers have more choice today than they’ve ever had in terms of the number of agents looking to help buy or sell their home, plus options to conduct a FSBO transaction. Real estate agents who can create relationships with likely buyers and sellers early will definitely have an advantage.

Will SmartZip be the leader in this? It may be too early to say. But one thing is clear: The technology, strategy, and results that SmartZip is producing right now indicate that agents who bet on them now are likely to see big returns in the future.

More Resources

There are lots of players trying to be the dominant force in real estate predictive analytics, and while no platform is perfect, we think that SmartZip is getting closer. It’s definitely a more techy approach than most real estate prospecting strategies.

We expect predictive analytics to be more and more mainstream as a proven real estate lead generation idea in the next couple of years. Check out our list of underrated lead generation ideas if you need some more fresh ideas.

The post Is SmartZip the Future of Real Estate Prospecting? appeared first on The Close.