Excellence is Easy when you can Dig into the Data

By Jaimie Beers 

Every agency is sitting on a goldmine, and it’s not the bricks and mortar of your inventory. It’s data: the information residing, for the most part, in your CRM and other IT systems. In this, property is just like any other industry. The key difference? Hardly any estate agent appreciates the true value of this resource; what information they should be monitoring; or how to use it to transform their business.

To unlock this insight, you don’t need to invest hundreds of thousands in state-of-the-art analytics technologies. There’s a much more affordable and effective way of making major operational improvements, enhancing your reputation, and growing your profits: simply knowing where to look.

Need to Know 

Most businesses would give anything for the ability to see into the future, and that goes double for those involved in highly competitive, seasonal, and cyclical industries like property. If they could consult a crystal ball, every agency would surely love the superpower to predict their cash flow – a major concern for any business, but especially so for an industry like property which is subject to so many macroeconomic and other unpredictable swings. Being able to predict cash flow would in turn enable agencies to  plan their workforce requirements. They don’t want employees overrun, with an inevitable deterioration in client service standards. Nor do they want to see skilled (and expensive) workers underutilized. 

If it were possible to predict the market and match staffing levels to these peaks and troughs, it would be transformative. Agencies would save tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands a year while retaining the agility to take full advantage of market upswings. And we’d all be doing it, right?

Here’s the thing: it’s really straightforward to build an accurate picture of short- and medium-term demand. It’s merely a matter of combining and comparing a few data points, such as historic versus current figures with a dash of other easily accessed trend data. OK, it won’t predict a war in the Middle East or an energy crisis, but it will still give you a major competitive advantage. At my last agency, we managed to reduce head count by 25% by getting really good at understanding availability ahead of time. Turnover went up by a fifth, while new business rose 48% year-on-year – and all this from interrogating data we either already owned, or was easy to obtain.

Start Thinking Small 

Headline figures like these should make agencies sit up and take notice of the enormous potential that lies untapped in their corporate information. Yet the ‘predictive’ element outlined above barely scratches the surface of what you can do with the right data.

Being agile and reactive to changing market conditions is great, but you can also harness data to improve operations, and optimise employee productivity, success rates, and reputation with your customers. For independent and boutique agencies, I’d argue these are at least as important as your staffing levels. 

If you want to build for the long-term, if your ambition is to create a culture of excellence within your team and attract the very best talent, you need to start thinking small. 

For example, have you considered monitoring the metadata from agents’ phone calls? Sounds about the dullest, least rewarding thing for a busy agency – until you find a link as we did, that longer calls generally lead to better, more thorough qualifications. Likewise, look at reputational issues like response times: how many clients are getting answers on the same day, and how does this help an inquiry into an instruction?

Forget the leaderboard – this isn’t about motivating employees, or punishing those who don’t hit their targets. It’s about knowing what works; what actions, behaviours, or processes translate to more sales, happier clients, and stronger sales. It’s about raising the performance floor of the agency and passing knowledge throughout the team. For example, every owner will know who their best negotiator is – but not necessarily why. Is it their natural charisma? Do they have great sales patter? Were they simply born that way? Sure, these ‘intangibles’ may be a factor. But interrogate, and you’ll likely find a more prosaic answer: she’s making double the calls, or is a winner at picking applicants; she stays late two evenings a week. And that’s something anyone in the business can learn from and replicate – to the enormous benefit of themselves and the agency as a whole/ 

The metrics of success

As mentioned above, much if not most of this data is readily available in your CRM or other systems. It’s (usually) child’s play to access and analyse this information. There are three, linked challenges: first, knowing how to extract it; secondly, what metrics are truly meaningful; and thirdly, how to combine this data to give you the outputs that will make the biggest difference to your success

The problem with most PropertyTech is that agents typically don’t get anything like the full value from it. If staff are only being trained on the essential functions, they might be leveraging just 20% of the available data and insight.

The second issue is about knowing which metrics truly matter. In this regard, many businesses are looking down the wrong end of the telescope. For example, at the end of each quarter, it’s common for owners to pore over the raw volume or value of the property they shifted, rather than the opportunities they missed out on…and why. If you’re not measuring variables like, ”how many clients dropped out after instruction?" or basic efficiency metrics like ´time taken per fee´, you can’t correct these structural problems.

Also, remember that individual data points are often of little use on their own. You need to understand how a variety of KPIs interact with each other. It takes time, effort, and a great deal of trial and error to arrive at an holistic understanding of all the factors and metrics that affect success. But if you’re committed to that journey, you will see real and measurable results in no time at all. Better conversions; more confident, competitive, and driven employees; greater agility and lower costs – these are just some of the benefits you can look forward to when you start treating your data as more precious than gold.