According to ReportLinker.com’s “Real Estate Global Market Report 2021: COVID 19 Impact and Recovery to 2030” that you can read here, the global real estate industry is projected to grow big from 2020 to 2021 despite the effects of the pandemic in industries worldwide.
From 2020’s $2,687.35 billion, the 2021 figure is estimated at $2,774.45 billion with a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 3.2 percent. By 2025, the industry is seen to grow to $3,717.03 billion at an 8 percent CAGR.
These promising numbers are nothing short of surprising, particularly given the initial scare that industry players felt at the onset of the pandemic. However, the opposite of what they feared happened, much to their delight.
Back in 2020, an average of around 42 percent of all listings in the U.S. got sold in under two weeks — a record-setting feat no less. It should be noted, however, that things could be different throughout 2021 as COVID-19 vaccines start to get rolled out and the resulting economic impact dramatically changing the dynamics in real estate selling and buying.
Here are four modern tech tools that have helped the real estate industry last year and will probably continue to do so this 2021:
VR and AR
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are two of the most helpful modern technologies that many industry players used at the height of the COVID-19 crisis and are still proving extremely beneficial until today.
Using these groundbreaking tech tools, real estate agents and brokers successfully marketed the beautiful homes for sale that they have under their respective accounts. AR and VR allowed sellers to give potential buyers virtual tours of homes that they have listed for sale. This made it possible for sellers to close deals with homebuyers in a COVID-safe way.
Moving forward, such tools would most likely enjoy continued use among real estate professionals given how convenient virtual property tours are for both buyers and sellers.
Big data and analytics
In an ever-evolving industry, data play a crucial part in practically every facet of the business: from analyzing buying and selling trends to doing price match analysis to determine the best price tags for real property listings.
With the advent of big data and analytics, the real estate industry is benefiting greatly from the power to process large chunks of data and use the results to guide them in making decisions to their advantage. In some cases, data analytics can even predict future trends, thus giving real estate companies and their agents or brokers the ability to position themselves better in anticipation of incoming trends.
Given such varied uses for big data and analytics, they will also most probably be part of many real estate companies’ playbooks for years to come.
CRM software
The real estate industry is highly competitive that a single incident of disappointment on the end of a potential buyer could break an otherwise promising deal. Fortunately, there are customer relationship management (CRM) software products that are commercially available to real estate companies, which allows them to provide an excellent customer experience each time.
A CRM software is designed to collect relevant customer information such as contact details, transactions or purchases, and similar data. By having such pieces of information on customers, real estate companies using such software can improve their customer engagement and even make informed predictions on the latter’s needs, thus laying down possible solutions even before the needs arise.
When used properly, CRM software can be an extremely helpful tool for real estate businesses to position themselves as reliable companies when it comes to offering outstanding customer experience.
Mobile applications
Practically all businesses and industries these days use mobile applications that allow them to operate smoothly and communicate with clients in a snap. Those in the real estate business, for their part, use specific mobile apps heavily because of the features they have that are particularly applicable to their needs.
Apps such as Redfin and Zillow, for example, serve as a centralized platform for agents and clients where they can list properties, sell or buy, and get notifications on new listings. Since mobile technology is pretty much a part of everyday life these days, having mobile apps for the industry means that doing deals and other activities related to real estate are now more convenient than ever.
Truly, the real estate industry is keeping tabs on new technologies and adopting them accordingly, which allows it to remain resilient amid the current pandemic. If you want to succeed then, you need to embrace these technologies and similar others to gain an advantage over the competition.
