The real estate landscape has witnessed significant shifts recently, highlighted by changing attitudes concerning commission structures. These developments represent a seismic shift within the industry and the largest break with “business as usual” in a generation.
Those developments will pose challenges, but also open new avenues for adaptation and growth. Prospecting – already central to the industry – will become even more crucial for ambitious professionals. In this context, technologies like Spokeo for Business may provide a competitive edge through open-source intelligence, an increasingly vital tool in navigating these changes. This article will explore why, and more.
Adapting to Efficient Prospecting
The evolution of fee structures in light of these recent developments creates some real uncertainty about revenue streams within the profession, especially for agents who have primarily focused on the buyer side. It’s possible a new and innovative compensation structure may emerge, but in the immediate future, the onus is on real estate professionals to proactively compensate for any potential loss of income. Three obvious strategies suggest themselves: 1) going after sell-side listings; 2) increasing the volume of sales in order to offset reduced commissions; or 3) targeting higher-value properties and clients so that taking a smaller percentage of the sale still results in a substantial commission per transaction.
Either strategy requires efficient prospecting. Tools that have served the industry well for decades, including conventional advertising, direct-mail flyers, open houses, and direct cold calls, are all inefficient: a substantial volume of approaches results in small numbers of leads. Referrals, purchased lists of leads and targeted online advertising are more productive but flawed. Referrals are difficult to generate at scale, lists can be stale, and online advertising can be a “black box” in which some ads work and some don’t, for reasons that may be opaque to the advertiser.
This creates a need for innovative tools that real estate professionals can leverage for client prospecting. Platforms that provide comprehensive data can streamline the process of identifying and connecting with potential clients or sellers, a crucial aspect in adapting to the new market realities.
Real Estate Prospecting with Spokeo for Business
It’s possible to make a strong argument that the realtors who survive and thrive in this new environment will be those who adapt most quickly. Spokeo for Business provides a competitive advantage in that quest, serving equally well as a tool for generating a higher volume of leads or leads for higher-value properties and clients.
Spokeo draws from over 5,000 individual data sources, yielding billions of data points. The intuitive search interface gives effective results with minimal training and can be used for numerous purposes by agency staff or directly by realtors themselves. The detailed reports generated by these searches can be used in many ways by real estate professionals, including:
- Identifying the owner of a given property.
- Identifying a potential client or seller from incomplete, outdated, or partially-legible contact information.
- Identifying potential clients or sellers who correspond to a desired demographic.
- Assessing the likelihood of property owners to sell, based on Spokeo’s proprietary methodology and historical data.
- Exploring potential clients’ or sellers’ social media presence. Public posts may yield evidence of a desire to sell or buy real estate; and a friends list filled with demographically similar contacts may indicate a fruitful source of potential referrals.
- Identifying owners of multiple properties, who hold promise as higher-volume clients.
- Identifying and finding contact information for high-value clients or sellers who may be difficult to locate through traditional means.
- Shaping online and conventional advertising strategies, by providing insight into the habits and attitudes of those in your chosen geographic area. This can inform the choice of media for conventional advertising, or appropriate keywords in online advertising.
Note: Spokeo for Business cannot be used to make decisions about credit, for tenant screening, or any purpose covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).
Aside from these direct contributions to prospecting and therefore potential sales, Spokeo can aid realtors in addressing various other challenges arising from this new regulatory environment.
Transparency and Verification Amidst Legal Changes
The recent legal developments in real estate emphasize the need for transparency. The push for changes in the industry’s longtime commission structure was rooted in the perception of collusion, a perceived lack of transparency, and arguments that commissions and some other aspects of the realtor/client relationship were obfuscated.
As a result, the industry can expect greater scrutiny from both regulators and consumers. Realtors will need not only to remain compliant with the prevailing legislation and industry practices, but to have the capacity to demonstrate conclusively, at need, that they’ve done so.
Tools like Spokeo for Business, which offer open-source intelligence, can aid realtors in aligning with evolving regulations and maintaining fair practices. Such transparency is becoming increasingly vital in building trust and credibility in the market. Spokeo is indeed known for making the world more transparent.
Enhanced Due Diligence in a Regulated Environment
As legal and regulatory focus intensifies, thorough due diligence becomes more important than ever. Tools that aggregate actionable data can become valuable for realtors, helping them verify information and allowing the mitigation of fraud and security risks. Examples of these mitigations include identifying potential fraud; and detecting potential money-laundering schemes by looking for inconsistencies in the offer they bring to the table or signs of criminal activity.
Aside from the realtor’s obligation to perform due diligence, research of this kind can have more immediate benefits. Agents can verify callers’ identities before a showing, with as little as a phone number or email address, search for any possible history of violent criminality or other “red flags”. (Learn more about using Spokeo for Business as a tool to help stay safe at showings by reading this article.)
Reputation Management in a Digital Age
In an era where legal actions often bring unethical practices into the spotlight, maintaining a strong reputation is essential. Real estate professionals can leverage social media aggregation and other open-source intelligence to manage and enhance their online presence, a critical component of reputation in today’s digital world.
Social media enables agents to connect with potential clients, fostering trust by showcasing expertise and sharing success stories. Well-maintained social media accounts can be leveraged to generate leads directly, or indirectly by soliciting referrals or positioning the agency or individual realtor as a source of expert knowledge in the field.
Spokeo began in 2006 as a social media aggregator, and Spokeo for Business offers unmatched social media insights. For real estate professionals wishing to leverage social media to their advantage, it’s a potent tool.
Gaining Deeper Market Insights
Understanding the evolving legal landscape requires deeper market insights. Platforms providing comprehensive data and analysis can enable realtors to grasp market dynamics more effectively, aiding in well-informed decision-making.
Existing industry sources provide excellent data about listing prices and selling prices, but convey little about the purchasers or sellers as individuals. Researching recent buyers and sellers matching your desired profile is a hypothetical use case for a tool like Spokeo for Business. The insights you glean into their purchase history, and any public posts they’ve made regarding their recent sales/purchases on social media, may help realtors identify similar prospects.
The pressure is greater for buyer-side agents, who will now face additional pressure to justify their involvement in the selling process. Here again, Spokeo’s ability to generate a detailed, holistic picture of the buyer as an individual gives the buyer’s agent the opportunity to craft a bespoke value proposition that meets the client’s needs, and maximizes the agent’s negotiating position.
Collaboration in a Changing Industry
The increased regulatory scrutiny might lead to more collaborations among realtors, law enforcement, and regulatory bodies. Reliable data sources can play a significant role in facilitating these collaborations, creating an environment of cooperation and shared understanding.
Collaboration within an agency can benefit the agents involved, if they have complementary skill sets or target markets. Agents specializing in older homeowners wishing to downsize might form a partnership with agents focusing on younger families weighing to upgrade, for instance. Collaborations between buying and selling agents, however, may be more problematic, given that the appearance of collusion underpinned the recent lawsuits against the NAR and other industry bodies. Spokeo for Business maintains a record of searches conducted and the resulting reports, should it become necessary to document those for compliance purposes.
The prospect of such searches to unearthing evidence of fraud, money laundering, or other criminal activity has already been discussed. This in turn may make it necessary and appropriate for realtors to build working relationships with their local law enforcement agencies, in order to thwart such attempts. Concise and detailed reports from Spokeo for Business provide a useful starting point for investigators, who may themselves be using the product.
Navigating Industry Challenges
The changing legal scenario presents various challenges, from regulatory uncertainties to the need for customized solutions. Technology platforms are adapting to these changes, aiming to align their offerings with the emerging needs of the real estate sector.
It is likely that success-focused professionals will identify use cases for more than one such software tool. Easy interoperability between these tools is a highly desirable feature, simplifying multi-vendor deployments, and reducing the need for expenditures on in-house IT support or third-party consultants.
Spokeo for Business is constructed with this need in mind. Its powerful application programming interface (API) can be used to share data easily with other analytic or data-gathering tools, either sharing the results of Spokeo searches with another product or receiving data from another product. In the latter case, that data will be displayed along with native search results in its reports, and will be viewable from the administrative Dashboard.
Conclusion
The recent legal developments surrounding NAR are indicative of a new era in real estate. In this changing landscape, the role of technology and platforms like Spokeo for Business has become increasingly significant. They offer tools and data necessary for realtors to adapt and thrive, ensuring preparedness for the dynamic nature of the real estate industry.
Ready to see what Spokeo for Business can do for you? Reach out today to begin a complimentary trial.
Disclaimer: This blog post is not intended as legal advice. Consult your legal and/or compliance department before making any changes to your operations.
Fred Decker is a prolific freelance writer based in Atlantic Canada, with articles appearing in print and online since 2007. He writes primarily on technology, personal finance, and food and food service, drawing on previous careers in those industries. He was educated at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia Community College, and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.
Sources
Real Estate Weekly: What Agents Need to Know About Commission Rule Changes