We put AI to work on Estate Agents' data and here is what we found out!

In this guest piece, the team at Lifesycle discuss a recent experiment they did with AI and estate agents' data and what it revealed. 

Want to know how to get more listings for a fact? Or how to increase your revenue? We put AI to work on estate agents' data from all over the country and here is how to do it.

No matter the size or age of the estate agency, one thing always seems to be at the forefront of that business owners’ thoughts…How do we get more sellers and landlords?

And the debates have raged for decades from knocking on every door in the neighbourhood, to sending out letters or leaflets in the post, running Facebook ads and so on but finally we have the answer, and it is not what you might think!

We also have some other quite flabbergasting findings around just how many of all those applicants that you spend time speaking to and registering end up buying through you and how good computers are at registering applicants as opposed to people.

Here are some of the highlights from the findings…

The average UK branch has 179 buyer registrations per month (when buyers are allowed to register themselves online anytime alongside asking your branch to do it manually for them), but just 8% of the buyers that enquire with you every month end up buying through you.

Staggeringly, only 27% of applicants registered manually by agents answer all the registration questions vs 100% of applicants that answer all the registration questions when registering themselves via online Heads-Up Property alerts. The knock-on effect of this is drastic, not only in time saving but in the creation of opportunities.

How to get more listings?

17% of the buyers that register have a property to sell that is either not yet on the market or on the market with another agent.

But this is not working for most agents because…

1. Only 27% of their registrations (48 registrations per month) are being asked the right questions, therefore they only know about 17% of that number (8) instead of 17% of all the registrations which would have been 30 per month!

2. The average registration with a property to sell consumes five articles over 2.7 months via both email and social media AFTER registration before they are ready to use the agent, and most agents simply don’t have the systems available to automate this, to see what their contacts are reading online or to do the online registration.

So, whilst our steady stream of new listings has been sitting under our noses all this time, a few things have been clouding our judgement, in that we are not fully qualifying every enquiry leaving us with just a tiny handful of potential listings. But of that tiny handful, they are not ready to have an agent round for a market appraisal yet anyway (certainly not ready to instruct you) and so therefore they fall by the wayside.

Don’t believe us? See if you can find out the details of some of the properties on the market with other agents and look to see if those people are in your database – guess what…in many cases they are, or at least were at some point, until they were ‘archived’!

Sounds interesting but what do actual agents say that have tried it?

“So, within the first four weeks we have picked up three listings influenced by Lifesycle. They were old ones from the database but ones that we had already chased and were apprehensive to chase again because we didn’t really know what to say to them. Anyway Lifesycle costs an agent around £15,600 per year and the listings I have won so far come to £34,000 just in the first few weeks!!

That’s one at £1,750,000, one at £900,000 and another at £750,000. So what I’m saying is that I have covered two years invoices in the first month of having Lifesyce! It literally went and found listings for me!!

Since then, we have had a vendor register his details on Christmas Eve, we have now been invited out for a valuation! And we are getting anything between 15-20 potential vendors registering a week which I don’t have time to call regularly and look after as much as I would love to. However they do go into the potential vendor journey and start getting very relevant articles etc. The system is genuinely like employing a six-figure superstar to go and find your business except this one doesn’t sleep!!”

Clint Nykamp – Director at Veritas Homes

You can watch more agents talking about Lifesycle or take a scorecard to benchmark your CRM software here.