Brokerages are placing their bets on Buyside to bring smart data to their agents’ fingertips
If there’s a trend dominating headlines and transforming businesses today, it’s predictive analytics. To become more efficient in generating and curating sales leads, the best-in-class predictive tools mine databases to augment the best in human intelligence. Today, society benefits from predictive applications in everything from online shopping to homeland security. In real estate, it should come as no surprise to learn that market-dominant brokerages of all sizes are also embracing the concept, utilizing their own ‘big data’ to win new business and gain a competitive advantage.
Enter Buyside, a groundbreaking data analytics and marketing company helping some of the nation’s top real estate firms leverage their data for greater profit. “We call it augmented intelligence,” says Buyside Founder and CEO Charles Williams. “Buyside is about enhancing existing processes with real-time data in a way that not only gets the agent in front of more customers, but also differentiates their skills and knowledge in a manner that wins more business.”
In this exclusive interview, Williams shares the strategies behind his company’s success, and the reasons why more brokers nationwide are adopting Buyside’s winning approach.
Barbara Pronin: Let’s begin with a brief recap of your career path, Charles, and how you came to found Buyside.
Charles Williams: I’ve been around real estate my whole life. My grandfather was an investor and my mother is a licensed broker, so, naturally, I went in the opposite direction and got a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronic Engineering from Bucknell University. I began my career as a project manager with General Electronic, then moved into Mergers and Acquisitions. In the evening, though, while completing my MBA from Goizueta Business School at Emory University, I bought and sold properties—over 20 times by the age of 30. When the market was trending downward in 2008, I noticed that there was a gap in the marketplace; that finding buyers was not as transparent as finding listings. I asked agents and brokers if they had a system to find buyers relevant to their properties. The answer was a resounding no, so I decided to build it.
The goal was to collect and analyze buyer activity in a given market so that brokers could not only speak to the demand for a property, but also be able to directly access agents with matching buyers for it—a compelling value proposition to attract seller leads, win listings, and close more transaction sides in-house.
BP: How does the process work?
CW: Many brokers don’t realize their data is a billion-dollar asset—one they already own but often don’t know how to leverage. According to industry statistics, brokers and agents spend millions each year to generate and capture buyer leads, but less than 3 percent of those leads, on average, are converted into closings. What remains is a wealth of buyer activity and behavioral data representing the interest and demand for various types of property.
Buyside helps brokers tap into that asset so they can demonstrate to potential sellers …read more
From:: Real Estate News