How Technology is Shaping the Real Estate Industry
Advancements in technology are shaping the way real estate agents and homeowners navigate the home selling and buying process. In today’s modern world, real estate professionals rely on sophisticated data to drive decisions, assess home value, and find ideal buyers.
Keeping up with the times can be difficult, but the technology that’s now available to agents is an exciting and convenient shift. Here are a few ways new technology is shaping the real estate industry and how agents can gain a competitive advantage by staying informed on the latest trends.
AI Technology
Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the real estate industry. While still a relatively new trend, AI is here to stay. For some, this may seem daunting. But the opportunities that accompany AI are already helping agents and brokers better understand and dissect data to assist their clients and secure a sale.
AI technology is enhancing the home buying and selling experience. Some AI applications can answer detailed questions about a home, like whether or not it has a pool or a backyard. The extra detail AI tech provides potential clients with, improves the process of searching for a home. It also helps agents find ideal clients, thus increasing the odds of selling a property.
So, why is it important for agents to narrow in on potential clients to find their ideal clients? Aside from securing a sale, real estate agents can accurately match people with their dream home. To do this, some agents use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to establish high-value touchpoints and then determine the people who fall into their niche pool of “the ideal client” for a specific property. Real estate agents that are successful in this will quickly see the benefit of a good reputation and continue to sell properties—a win, win!
Automating Home Valuation and Machine Learning (ML) Algorithms
Real estate image-recognition technology is simplifying the way clients find homes. Larger companies, like Zillow, use this tech to find and identify pixel patterns in a photo—with this, they can gather information on a home, down to small details like the type of countertops in an image. The goal? To categorize interior features in a home and correlate it to home value.
Both agents and homeowners benefit from image-recognition data. The impact this technology has on home improvement decisions is seen when a homeowner is deciding whether or not to renovate their home before selling. Machine Learning (ML) algorithms assist homeowners by examining other homes in the area to identify key features that might play into the home’s selling price.
For example, let’s say you want to remodel your kitchen but you aren’t sure if it’s a worthy Return on Investment (ROI) for your current neighborhood. You search Google and find out that a medium kitchen remodel costs between $15,000 and $40,000, but you have no clue if potential buyers are looking for homes with new kitchens in your area. That’s where image-recognition data comes in and helps both homeowners and real estate agents understand a home’s worth and more accurately calculate the ROI. From there, homeowners and agents can help to determine whether or not a kitchen remodeling project makes sense before putting the home on the market.
Real estate agents certainly benefit from automating home valuation. While inspired by the human brain, the sophisticated algorithm examining homes is more accurate. The use of AI tech during the home valuation process helps to eliminate human bias, automate routine tasks that are tedious for agents, and makes searching for a home more sophisticated than ever before. Lastly, the data determined by the intelligent algorithm helps agents and homeowners get a better deal since there’s more information to consider.
The Internet of Things (IoT) and real estate management
The Internet of Things (IoT) is helping real estate professionals grow and manage businesses more efficiently than ever before. IoT enabled devices not only make homes and the process of selling them smarter but also takes a lot of the leg-work off of the agent. Through developments in AI, agents can save time, eliminate error, and more productively analyze automated data.
Agents and property managers can utilize the cloud to access documents and track trends in an organized way. The data available to property managers, in particular, helps to better understand tenant behavior and preferences. Often, this data is used to inform decisions on how to improve properties and provide a top-notch experience for tenants.
If you haven’t heard, Computer Vision technology is essential and beneficial for real estate professionals. This technology allows you to organize listing images, improve user experience, rank property platforms higher, and more. It can take a lot of time to organize photos by room, so automating the assortment process is a huge win for agents looking to create an organized, clean look on-page for visitors.
A visually pleasing real estate website that includes professional, high-quality images can improve the way users consume content. Plus, a clutter-free site encourages visitors to spend more time searching listings and increases the odds of them becoming a new client.
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