Every housebuilder wants to save three things: time, effort and money. Enter, proptech. Put simply, it’s the term for technological solutions that solve problems for the property industry.
Proptech applications can give you something genuinely valuable to offer potential buyers that the majority of your competition can’t. It can even help predict consumer needs and react to them before the consumer even realises those needs themself. From data-capturing website plugins to super-smart apps, choosing the right tools can help your firm ride the proptech wave and avoid being left behind. Here’s where to start…
1. Virtual reality viewings
Virtual reality (VR) reduces the speed and effort required to prepare and view properties for both housebuilders and home buyers. Imagine the scene. You’re in an office in London, but you’re viewing a two-bed new-build in Manchester. You can inspect the power shower in the bespoke bathroom, admire the nooks and crannies in the kitchen and even wander onto the balcony to check out the view. If it’s not the home for you, you can subsequently dive into half a dozen other properties in the same fashion. VR can really give leads a nudge in the right direction: if you can offer this kind of time-saving technology to potential customers, more will sign up to your database. However, it is expensive. Investing in VR will depend on the size of your project and budget, although demand will surely fuel innovation and prices will reduce in the future.
2. Plug-in tools for housebuilders
Only two per cent of unique website visitors actually leave contact details in the new homes sector. In order to capture those web users and turn them into prospects, housebuilders are turning to easy-to-implement plug-in tools to engage and provide value. Our prospect generation tools are proven to capture leads early on in prospect’s home buying journey. An effective example is our white label online valuation tool, which can be quickly added to your website to reduce cost-per-lead and boost the return-on-investment for your marketing efforts. It increases the number of leads generated from housebuilders’ web traffic by 50% and you’ll be able to set up a bespoke auto-responder email that encourages prospects to re-engage with your website.
3. Drone technology
Bringing drones into construction not only saves time and money – and improves safety for housebuilders – it can also improve your sales. These futuristic flying robots can be used to capture high-quality 360-degree views of new home developments and their immediate surroundings, showing prospects exactly what they can expect when living in a specific place. If a project is still in its planning or construction phase, drones can be used to create videos of the progress. Property videos can then be turned into valuable content to capture new leads who want to keep an eye on the development.
4. AI (Artificial Intelligence)
Selling homes will always be a physical affair, but the future is digital. Chatbots (computer programs that imitate human-like conversations with web users) are on the rise in the property world and they can save housebuilders time and effort when it comes to lead generation and customer engagement. The smart little gizmos can collect information about home buyers, allowing potential customers to provide data such as convenient viewing times or personal budgets. In short, AI can manage new prospects for your house building firm even when you’re tucked up in bed.
5. Big data
Choose the right big data tools and you could uncover more stats, figures and insights than you’ve ever dreamed of. You can spot trends in new homes sales to improve your own, such as what kind of properties are most in demand, or which locations are most valued. But how to cut through the minefield that is the world of big data applications? It all depends on the project at hand: Hadoop is popular for storage needs, MongoDB for data management, OpenRefine cleans up messy data, Qubole will help with data analysis and Tableau is perfect for visualising data to make sense of it all. Being confident about your data means you can be sure marketing efforts are worthwhile, while targeting fresh leads with laser-like precision.
If you’re interested in investing in smart proptech tools to boost leads and sales for your house building firm, get in touch with us for a demonstration.
