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How AI And Automation Is Changing How We Use Customer Relationship Management

There is no doubt that Artificial Intelligence is improving in every aspect. Whether it be in everyday technology or in business, the changes in AI are clear to see if you know what you are looking for. When it comes to the real estate industry, Artificial Intelligence is changing the way we do things. More and more of our daily business becomes automated, and it is changing the way we use customer relationship management or CRM.

How AI will drive real estate’s evolution in 2018

In the very near future, machine learning and artificial intelligence will play a much larger role in the industry, and there are no signs of AI growth slowing down anytime soon. Global AI revenue is constantly growing, and roughly 75% of all developers currently use some form of AI technology in one form or another. This means the creation of the digital end of your business will soon be majority reliant on AI technology for your daily business operations.

In real estate especially, the time-saving benefits of AI technologies are priceless. What was once a tedious process of manually sorting through data to try and identify opportunities, leads, prospects, and trends is now all performed by automated artificial technological beasts. Most of which are very easy to come by, as well as being affordable enough to factor into your everyday running costs.

AI Focus

Having technology available, that knows who is ready to buy, when they are ready, what neighbourhoods are booming and how to connect the dots between these elements is invaluable in the real estate industry. The most time-consuming tasks have been automated, allowing any seller to do their job of selling. Gone are the days of paper trails and endless researching and data crunching, to match buyers with sellers. AI has simplified your job. It has changed the way we do business to the extent that we are far more productive, and far more efficient.

Artificial Intelligence brings all the available resources together, allows you to focus on direct customer focus, and achieve far better sales targets. AI saves time. It’s plain and simple. An agent’s role requires balance, and AI helps to achieve this balance by allowing you to focus on the things that cannot rely on Artificial Intelligence.

Lead Generation

AI helps to generate a higher quality of leads through the data that is compiled and sorted. AI data crunching happens in a matter of seconds, where it can take days for a human to do the job, especially when you have face to face meetings with existing prospects and leads. AI can pinpoint the people who are ready to buy or ready to sell. Every year more and more people buy and sell homes using the internet, and this is where AI truly shines through. Artificial Intelligence gathers buyer and seller data from the internet and knows who is ready to buy or sell. Everywhere from social media to property databases offer a plethora of information that AI uses to make your job simpler.

What Lies Beyond?

Beyond the generation of leads, AI helps to also enrich and validate them with data, provide insight into lead preferences and behaviours to allow you, the agent to approach with a considerate and strategic manner. AI has also opened new possibilities for targeting and behaviour analysis and will scan social media to find the people most likely to respond to a specific type of marketing campaign. From there it can create ads for the specific person based on their search data.

There are hundreds of ways AI and automation can help your real estate business boom, and this just scratches the surface.

Arosoftware named as a finalist in the Sunshine Coast Business Awards

Arosoftware is proud to announce that they are a finalist in the 2018 Sunshine Coast Business Awards

“Being recognised for an achievement like this is truly a reflection of the great work our team does every day. We proudly work with agencies all around the country, but it is an honour to recognised and nominated for an award in the birthplace of Arosoftware, over 14 years ago” – Aron Rubulis – Arosoftware CTO

The Sunshine Coast’s longest established business awards have been celebrating business success since 1995. The Sunshine Coast Business Awards recognises the many, impressive business success stories throughout the region, and provides exceptional networking events for the local business community throughout the year.

The awards program culminates in the major gala event held in November and attended by 600 people from all corners of our business community.

We have added 8 new website integrations

Arosoftware are happy to announce that customers can now automatically upload their listings directly to 8 new websites.

“We are always looking to support our customers by making it easy to upload to the websites they need”. Ben Milligan, Head of Support, Arosoftware.

The new additions are the latest to join a growing list of over 50 websites that Arosoftware have a dedicated feed to.

If you would like to start automatically posting your listings to these websites, just contact the website portal directly to get started. As always, our support team are here to help you.

Are you already listing properties on these portals and would like to know how Arosoftware can automate your business? Contact us to learn more.

How will the cryptocurrencies affect the real estate industry?

Bitcoin’s rising mainstream appeal is opening up innovative avenues for the housing market to entice a new type of customer, and other cryptocurrencies are starting to build momentum within the real estate industry. The industry is already trialling the use of digital currencies to pay for things like services, rent, services and sales deals.

Many businesses across the globe are now merchants that accept cryptocurrencies and the number is quickly growing.

There are already many news stories around of real estate agents and brokers accepting bitcoin as payment, and developers are also doing the same, with recent news headlines of a New York property developer accepting bitcoin for payment on a whole complex.

Blockchain and cryptocurrencies, although still in their early stages, have so much potential to change the way real estate is attained and traded.

The main potential change is when cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin and Litecoin, become more widely accepted as a form of currency to conduct property transactions.

The main issue with buying property with cryptocurrencies, is that the market is highly volatile, meaning that in the time it takes for a sale to go through, the price could increase or decrease in value substantially. If you take a look at the3 average time it takes for a home sale to close, (lets say 50 days as an example) and we look at the bitcoin price from November-December last year.

Bitcoin’s price on 6th November 2017 was $7,300USD, and roughly 50 days later, it hit record highs of $19,783USD. Now in the grand scale of things, that’s a huge difference for both parties involved in the sale. So, the volatility of the currencies like this make it very difficult to lock in a guaranteed price on a sale, and when you’re talking median house prices of around $550,000, using cryptocurrencies can seriously impact an end price for a contract.

Although the volatility of cryptocurrencies will remain an issue for some time, the technology driving it however, is a completely different story. New technologies based on the blockchain technology, like smart contracts will be used in many ways throughout the industry to increase security and will significantly reduce the time of real estate transactions.

This tech will allow contracts to be immediate, as well as instantaneous fund transfers, saving the broker ridiculous amounts of time.

How To Create a Permanent Commission Flow and Recession Proof your Business.

Are you always struggling to have a steady flow of commissions coming in? Some months are great and other months you’re on rice and water, I’ve been there and so have most agents. How would you like to never have that problem again and have people coming to you to sell their properties?

Well, this is a case of working smarter and not harder!

Become an investment expert.

If you work in an agency with a rent roll you’re off to a flying start, I didn’t have one and it still worked, let me tell you how.

Call every Landlord and ask them if they would like to become a part of your “VIP list”. As a member, you will receive;

Bargain properties, that must sell
Properties with great returns
Properties in unique location
Properties in locations that have shown tremendous capital growth

Make sure members know that these properties will be sold quickly and that they will need to contact you directly as you will not have time to call them personally.

When I did this I didn’t have a rent roll to start with so I would ask every buyer (home buyers and investors) whether I sold them a property or not, if they would like to a part of the “VIP list.

The key to this is that you are sending these properties out as they become available with your agency or another agency (with that agencies approval), so you really need to keep an eye on the market and do not be concerned if you don’t get paid on every sale because some agents won’t pay commission on a great property as they know they can sell it themselves. What you will start to build is a very strong investor database that will trust you and will refer others providing you a pool of clients that will buy all year round, through good and bad markets.

Developers will be knocking your doors down to sell their stock and providing it stacks up as a great buy you will be able to move their properties. Brand new properties can be extremely attractive to investors because of all the depreciation deductions.

Whenever you are sending out a property make sure you create a spreadsheet that shows what the income is, expenses, depreciation schedule (this can be done by an accountant or sourced by doing some research) and importantly showing what they would need to have as either a deposit or in equity to buy. You should create a spreadsheet for 3 income brackets ($50,000, $75,000, $100,000) to show recipients that are employed if they used a PAYG withholding application form which basically means that instead of receiving a lump sum tax refund at the end of the year they can have that amount refunded over the 12 months in their pay packet by having less tax deducted, resulting in very little out of pocket expense to buy the property.

You must have the appropriate disclaimer stating that these are only example outgoing figures and that they should check with their accountant as everyone’s circumstances vary. Please make sure you’re up with the current tax laws with property investment by discussing this with an accountant.

Finally, it’s always good to put in additional content of any new laws that may affect investors and market stats from your area into your newsletter.

Most people will want to get onto this list and I found that they were, in many cases, forwarding these emails straight on to investors they know..

By following these steps you will create a permanent commission flow and have a recession proof business.