Remote viewings, 3D tours and digital employees are likely to become permanent features of New Zealand’s housing market while the weekend rush around open homes could soon be a thing of the past.
One of Australia’s leading property commentators believes that the technology adopted to keep the market operating during efforts to combat the coronavirus will fundamentally alter how the real estate industry works.
Kylie Davis, formerly an executive at property analysts CoreLogic and now an expert in proptech (property technology), says one of the first things to noticeably change will be open homes. While physical open homes, when permitted again, will still be a necessary part of selling a home, fewer people are likely to attend them. The uptake of remote viewing technology means only serious buyers will come, Davis says.
“What Covid-19 has done to the market is create a pressure cooker that has forced change on real estate agents to make them think differently around why they do the things they’ve done the way they’ve always done them,” she says.
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“Until now there’s always been an excuse to hang on to the way they’ve always done it and not to bother to try and introduce the new thing. But now, suddenly, you can’t do things the way you’ve always done them.”
Australian property expert and founder of the Proptech Association of Australia Kylie Davis. Photo / Supplied
Video tours and virtual viewing have been around for a while in the tech space, says Davis – who recently founded the Proptech Association of Australia – but some agents have resisted them.
But buyers are busy people who are demanding a better experience than running around reorganising tasks so they can go to 10 properties every weekend for the three to six months it might take them to find a property.
They may soon whittle houses down via virtual viewing to two or three they really like, and sellers will know those who do attend open homes are more likely to be serious potential buyers.
“At the moment if you’re a seller and your agent says, ‘Oh, we had 10 parties come through, but four of them left an email [email protected]’, you’re not going to buy that those people are serious buyers,” she says.
Davis says there will changes in how agents market properties in a digital space, to ensure the right buyers are targeted in the first place. She believes that those agents who say people need to attend open homes in order to fall in love with a property have the wrong business model for these times.
“This is like a Tinder date. Am I swiping left or am I swiping right? Like, I’ve done the virtual walkthrough and now, yes, I am interested in meeting,” she says.
“No one’s expecting you to fall in love at first swipe when you’re on Tinder and that’s not necessarily going to happen here.
“What they’re going to do is say, ‘Yes, this is worth investing my time’, and in this new economy that we’re in, in this new digital world that we’re in, one of the most important commodities and most important resources that we have is time and attention.”
People want customised information and are no longer interested in being interrupted with phone calls or bland bulk messaging, she says, and agents should be filtering and sorting for buyers.
And they also need to save themselves time. Davis points to a study that found agents carry out four hours of administration per property. “If you sell 400 properties a year, that’s almost eight months that you’re losing in time on administration.”
There is technology to help, such as CRM (customer relationship management) tools, which many agents have but only use 20 to 40 percent of the capabilities. “Right now, we’re seeing agents diving down and finding out what their CRM really does and what else they should be doing with it.
“We’re seeing agents looking at what data is out there, how they capture it and what they’re doing with it to improve their marketing and their customer service.”
Artificial intelligence tools are likely to accelerate change in the industry. Davis cites as example the Australian digital employee platform, RITA, which can help agents by analysing vast quantities of data and synthesising it with third party data relating to the marketplace in which they work.
“RITA does lots of things because you train her, like an employee, to do what you want her to do.”
RITA will take online inquiries, for example, and immediately respond. She inserts the inquiries into the database and looks up what information the company and the digital universe has available, then scores, prioritises and notifies the agent who to contact.
The agent is armed with enough information to have a personalised conversation with the potential client and the relationship being developed is enhanced.
Negotiating platforms are also coming into their own. Davis says private treaty negotiations run through an agent are inefficient because of the time involved. “If you have five or six genuine buyers interested in a property, the agent has to ring each of those people every single time an offer comes in to let them know what the offer is up to. You can lose a couple of days pretty quickly doing that.”
Negotiating tools, however, give buyers an alert so they know where the offer is up to, with as much transparency as the agent and vendor are comfortable with. “The feedback we’re hearing for these products is that buyers love it.”
While the methods of selling property will change with technology, the core values of giving an amazing, personalised service won’t, Davis says.
Her advice to agents is that they should continue doing what they need to do in order to keep their businesses afloat during the Covid-19 restrictions, but they should also to look at the technology they already have at their disposal and assess what else they need.
“Give your staff projects to research the tech and tools that are available so when this is all over you’re in a better space, so you’re not just going back to the old normal.”
