Elite AgentTECH + SOCIAL

Together with technology

In 2018, REA Group CIO Tomas Varsavsky was listed as one of the top 20 CIOs in Australia. While he deeply understands the trends impacting consumers, businesses and the real estate industry, he says it’s how these trends come together in real estate that gets really exciting.

One day, in the not too distant future, instead of booking a photographer you might find yourself launching a flying drone into a property.

It will scan the house in a few minutes and allow you to upload three 3D portal images directly to realestate.com.au.

Maybe it won’t be you who does the launching. Maybe you’ll post the drone to the property owner and let them deploy it themselves to save on content creation and travel costs.

You might also be able to pull a really small, smart 3D camera out of your pocket that will make virtual reality doable anytime and anywhere.

Samsung is already generating phones with such capability.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer science fiction or a purely academic pursuit – it is impacting our lives and businesses worldwide are adopting it.

Consumers are becoming used to having AI available in the home and on their smartphones courtesy of Siri, Google Home and Alexa providing convenience, speed and immediate answers to pressing questions.

The new mobile standard – 5G – will massively improve throughput and latency to mobile devices and the major networks are starting to roll out the technology.

If you’re in a lucky neighbourhood, the early arrival of 5G phones and networks will make rich content king again.

Video will flow easily, at higher resolutions, and make augmented and virtual reality possible with a sizeable house tour file taking less than a second to load.

This will also expedite the take-up of smart home devices (or the Internet of Things) with increasingly more deployed everywhere. This might lead to an OFI with devices around the home collecting crunchable data – for example, popular points of interest.

Like many other businesses, REA is substantially investing in AI to look for ways to better service buyers and sellers, understand the property market (automated valuation models) and provide higher quality leads to agents through lead scoring and Agent Match.

In your own business you can improve consumer service levels when informing them of appointments and responding to emails with ease.

But more than anything, consumers crave an experience that is personal to them.

And smart brands are designing experiences that allow the consumer to feel a deeper connection and that the agency understands their needs and wants.

Agents have an opportunity to create one-to-one experiences for their customers that will build better relationships and help them win business.

One of our top goals at REA is to better connect you with consumers through personalised communications and putting properties they are interested in in front of them.

This in turn this puts you in front of more consumers.

The most exciting thing is not each of these trends, but how they all come together to create new opportunities and experiences in the real estate market.

5G makes mobiles better; this generates more engagement and data, which we can use to understand our consumers.

Then we can use AI to match them to the perfect agent and connect the two parties instantly via mobile, which will allow live chat.

But it’s still up to you to take this connection offline and build a trusted relationship in the physical world, leveraging technology at the points you need it to achieve a frictionless transaction and stay in touch in a personalised and relevant way.

Tech will change the landscape but where it gets exciting is how you can bring all the pieces together to deliver a differentiated, efficient and personal experience.

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Tomas Varsavsky

Tomas Varsavsky is a technology executive with extensive experience in many technologies, business domains and types of roles. Currently, Tomas is the Chief Technology and Data Officer at REA Group.