HOUSINGNEWS REPORT
DATA-FED DISRUPTION IN REAL ESTATE
for new clients given that each agent has an exclusive territory according to Eckardt. “We estimate that a traditional agent spends 70 percent of their time finding new business,” he said, noting that the average Purplebricks agents has seven years of experience, indicating that even veteran agents are interested in hanging up their prospecting hat. “(Our agents are) professional, full-time, ethical, just want to work with customers, not deal with online lead gen or CRM. There is a home at Purplebricks for them. “We still believe the agent is the center of the transaction,” he added. “Their role is more as a trusted advisor rather than gathering information.” Disrupting Future Housing Inventory A completely self-funded startup, Offrs.com has not needed to raise capital thanks in large part to the success of its predictive analytic-driven products for real estate agents and others in the industry, according to co-founder Rich Swier. “It’s been very rapid growth for us over the last few years,” he said noting that since the company launched in 2013 its customer base has grown to more than 10,000 agents accessing its predictive analytics and marketing platform, designed to help those agents identify inventory of homes for sale before those homes are listed or the homeowner even knows they are going to list. OFFRS.COM:
“We are predicting the single transaction, and by predicting the single transaction we are also predicting the broader market. This will be a living and breathing machine … and that will impact the way people will look at the market.” RICH SWIER CO-FOUNDER, OFFRS.COM
“Most of the market today is looking at a transaction-based model,” Swier noted. “In order to predict that transaction you have to have predictive analytics. In order to get to that transaction before others do, you have to have predictive analytics.” Many real estate agents fear that discount brokerage models such as Purplebricks and iBuyer models such as Offerpad will eventually push them out of the real estate transaction, according to Swier. “There’s a natural disruption that’s happening on many levels,” he said. “If real estate agents embrace the data we provide, they can solidify their place in the real estate transaction.” In the simplest terms, Offrs.com predicts future real estate transactions so that agents and others in the industry can identify these transactions
further upstream, before they flow into the discount brokerage and iBuyer business models. “It really depends on who comes to the table first,” he said, citing a statistic that shows 70 percent of soon-to-be sellers choose the first real estate agent they meet. “Predictive analytics is the name of the game. If you predict future listings, you’re going to be first in the door. That’s one of the reasons we sell our data exclusively because it’s so powerful that whoever has that data is going to be in a great position. ”Offrs.com pulls data from more than 25 data providers, including consumer, demographic, financial, property, recorder and behavioral social media data. “We have a unique combination of machine learning methods, and we base it on geography,” said Swier,
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JUNE 2018 | ATTOM DATA SOLUTIONS
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