Whether you’re new to estate agency or a seasoned veteran, your daily to-do list must feel like it’s off the scale. In this 21st century, post-Covid world we live in, how you manage your workload makes the difference between you and the next broker.
From marketing yourself and your listings, networking, transacting, managing colleagues and clients, it can be overwhelming for even the most experienced realtor. So many tasks. So little time. Sometimes it may feel like it’s hard to even know where to start.
We’ve got your answer, in one little word. Efficiency.
And this week, we’re bringing you 5 daily time-busting hacks that’ll help you master the art of it.
Whether you’re ‘asking Alexa’ or ‘summoning Siri’, Conversational Search is not only rolling off our tongues, it’s boosting sales.
We’re not talking lowkey decisions, like in which hotel to spend our next city break. AI-driven ‘conversations’ are now driving far more important choices, including finding the right real estate broker to buy our next home.
Although unlikely to ever fully replace the keyed-search, agreed wisdom predicts massive growth in the conversational AI market by 2025. Business leaders and marketers are waking up to the conversation, contemplating new ways of using this technology to get customers to complete a transaction.
Here’s what Oliver Pickup writing for Raconteur has to say (Intro by Charlotte C.)
The proliferation of smart devices and the improving capabilities of AI-powered voice assistants mean that voice searchability is no longer a mere ‘nice to have’.
Are marketers and their businesses investing enough time, money and effort in improving their conversational search rankings? Maybe we should ask Siri?
Given that Juniper Research forecasts that consumers will be using voice assistants on more than 8.4 billion devices by 2024, while MarketsandMarkets predicts that the global conversational AI market will grow from £3.4bn in 2020 to £9.8bn in 2025, there’s a strong case that they should be doing more.
Consumers embrace new technology if it makes life simpler and more effortless for them. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Firms that have already invested in achieving higher voice search rankings are benefiting from it. For instance, translation service Lionbridge started optimising for voice search in July 2019. Twelve months later, it had almost 47 times more ‘featured snippets’ – the short text at the top of a page of Google search results. This improvement aided a 127% year-on-year increase in traffic to the firm’s website.
“Businesses should view optimising for conversational search as mandatory,” argues Olga Andrienko, head of global marketing at Semrush, which manages Lionbridge’s marketing analytics. “We have already seen the dramatic effect it can have on businesses’ search results. As voice assistants are further integrated into people’s everyday lives, this influence will grow.”
Nick McQuire, chief of enterprise research at tech consultancy CCS Insight, agrees. “As one of AI’s most important areas of development, conversational search is progressing rapidly,” he says.
Bringing AI to the masses
Conversational search development has accelerated “because it sits at the centre of two important trends”, McQuire suggests. First is the improvement in AI speech technology. Second is the need to improve information search in businesses. “This area”, he says, “is often listed as ‘broken’ by customers owing to information silos, especially across several data stores, documents and applications.”
McQuire continues: “The fact that all the big tech firms have started to tackle this area with products and tools demonstrates the scale of the customer need.”
Conversational search is a more complex matter than people simply using their voices instead of keyboards, though. For instance, on what smart device is the search being conducted – a screen-less Apple HomePod, a Google Nest Hub Max or an Amazon Alexa?
Amazon Alexa
Apple HomePod
Google Nest Hub Max
While companies can pay to appear on the first page of a conventional typed search on a computer screen, mastering conversational search is not so straightforward. For one thing, marketers don’t always have the same real estate for advertising.
If a device being used for voice search has no screen, how likely is it that a business will pull traffic to its website if it ranks outside the top three search results? Equally, if the device has a screen, a more visual response is presumably better. Notably, the average answer length for the three most popular voice assistants – Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant – is 23 words, according to Semrush.
Convenient and contextualised answers
Semantics aside, the crucial point for marketers is that consumers want their problems solved quickly. So says Kashif Naqshbandi, CMO at IT recruiter Tenth Revolution Group, who adds: “Most of the time they are not just looking for a ‘what’, but also a ‘how’ and ‘why’. This is why question-driven conversational search has spiked.”
Naqshbandi explains that few people are now searching online for, say, a “mountain bike” and then clicking through web pages of information. Instead, they are asking specific questions – for instance, “what sort of mountain bike should I buy?” – to seek a contextualised answer.
“Consumers are more accustomed to these fast, personalised interactions that help them cut through the digital noise and find a solution,” he says. “Marketers have to evolve to deliver interactive, dialogue-based experiences to stay competitive.”
Euan Matthews, director of AI and innovation at ContactEngine, a developer of conversational AI systems, agrees that people ultimately want to save time wherever possible and are happy to pay for convenience.
“Consumers embrace new technology if it makes life simpler for them. Otherwise, what’s the point?” he says, attributing Amazon’s continuing ascendancy to the time it saves customers. But he adds that a “big pitfall” for marketers is to focus only on the search element.
To illustrate his point, Matthews says that some devices, when asked about the best local Indian restaurant, say, will now offer a follow-up option of booking a table through Google, and – if the user accepts – they will add this booking to the digital calendar.
“This time saving is not because of the conversational search,” he says. “It’s more because that search has been seamlessly married with the ability to execute a transaction on your behalf. Marketers must consider how to marry conversational search and the transactional capability of the voice assistant, because this is what saves consumers time and makes it more likely that they’ll progress down the sales funnel.”
The direction of travel is clear, so marketers must alter their course accordingly. “We will see more advances in the ability for conversational search to end in a transaction – and this will drive uptake,” Matthews predicts.
Will it ever replace keyed search? “I doubt it,” he says. “Some searches are best not voiced aloud.”
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of OVERWRITE.ai and its owners.
Oliver Pickup contributes to Raconteur – Special reports in The Times / The Sunday Times
This story has been published from an online news feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline and has been changed.
OVERWRITE.ai is a world first, user-friendly marketing solution that allows estate agents to instantly autowrite unique, search-optimised property descriptions, taking the boring out of the daily grind.
Regardless of your business or the industry you’re in, technology and its pace of change, is forcing you to adapt at an unprecedented rate.
Adopting technology into your growth strategy is a no-brainer. But some technologies require the type of change that has a real impact on human values, like privacy. Without a clear ethical position, employees lose faith in their management’s integrity, and rather than benefit from tech, the business suffers.
When adopting technology, companies need to do more than just ensure regulatory compliance. To retain the trust of increasingly sceptical workforces, consumers, and even public, they must invest even further.
From Rolex watches, to yacht parties or the lure of swanky new offices, there’s endless incentives tempting brokers to join the “next best” real estate team.
Selecting an agency to work for is often a hard decision for the budding real estate recruit. Every office has its own pay structure, support systems, culture, incentives and other non-monetary attributes that make it stand out.
So how can an agency monetise its value proposition, in order to attract the best talent in the market? And what other factors can influence new agents to join, whilst retain those already employed, so a brand’s most valuable assets aren’t poached by the competition?
Real estate has long been the go-to investment for those looking to build long-term multi-generational wealth. In red-hot real estate markets, a property’s time-on-market is often single-digit days, and a “fix and flip” investment is fast becoming a tempting strategy.
But as with any business decision, you must take some precautionary measures before diving in.
A “get rich quick” attitude to flipping a home could have you ending up in the poorhouse, and your project turning into a bottomless money pit.
There’s a whole lot of house moving going on right now, as worldwide property sales reach levels unseen in decades. With this brings stiff competition amongst brokers, causing some agents to go above and beyond – even after the deal is done.
So how can agents think outside the box when it comes to building long term client relationships, and leaving that all important lasting impression?
We’ve all heard about that agent who remembers their client’s birthdays, sending cards, flowers or baskets of chocolates. It’s not rocket science, but it’s the little things that can really count.
The Covid-19 pandemic has hastened the technological transformation of various sectors and Dubai’s property market has joined the bandwagon.
Cashing in on the need for change and operational efficiency among brokers in the industry, property technology platform OVERWRITE.ai was set up in the UAE in the third quarter of last year.
Covid-19 has shaken the confidence of an endless list of businesses around the world. But when it comes to PropTech, Founders and Investors aren’t worried. Are we about to witness a bull-run on PropTech and if so, how can real estate companies, startup founders, and investors, position themselves to seize the gains that lie ahead?
Name any real estate agent on the planet who would turn down a brand new wardrobe full of tailor-made suits 👔🔥… We couldn’t either.
But it can become an expensive habit. And it doesn’t take a fashionista, or financial advisor, to tell you that blowing every commission cheque on a fancy new suit probably isn’t the wisest decision.
So, for the broker who wants to “look the part”, without breaking the bank, check out these Suit Shopping Hacks.
Social media is still a mystery for a lot of agents. Unfortunately, this means even the best agents make mistakes, blunders, and faux pas that could easily be avoided.
Having a home designed for sustainability is no longer something “nice to have”. Boosted by the longer term impact of Covid, a new-found focus on health has rapidly raised the profile of eco-friendly homes, with sustainability and green tech getting wrapped up into a broader sense of overall “wellness.”
And emphasis on wellness features, or eco-luxury, to boost property profiles, is sweeping across property markets world-wide.
What was previously considered an added expense or after thought, is now expected, among many buyers, (particularly in the luxury market), as part of the pitch.
At the start of 2021 I made an economic prediction about the Dubai real estate market and where it’s headed during the first half of the year.
Four months later and the market’s on a roll. Transaction prices have been appreciating and volumes are at record levels. So is this the best time to invest in Dubai property?
In the latest move from the UK’s fierce property portal wars, Zoopla, the market’s second largest player, has just launched a red-hot 🔥 new app feature ‘My Home’, backed by a multi-million pound marketing blitz. And it’s all designed to make your job easier.
Last week, a deeply confused swath of the real-estate universe had a chance to get an answer to a long-running mystery: Is Compass an industry-disrupting technology platform, or just an old-fashioned brokerage with good branding and a lot of cash?
