Where Should you Focus your Budget Next Year in Real Estate Technology?

As we approach the holidays, it’s time to look back at what you’ve accomplished and where you need to make improvements. The same is true for your real estate technology investments.

Maintain existing web properties

Delivering a strong web presence is critical to marketing your property listings, so it’s important to make sure it is as up-to-date and functional as possible. The following are some tips for making sure your website stays current:

• Ensure that your website is mobile friendly. This means the site should be easy to navigate on a phone or tablet, with content that can be viewed easily at smaller sizes.
• Make sure the content on your site is relevant and interesting. You want people searching for homes in Minneapolis or Brainerd to find you when they search!
• Ensure that users have a great experience when using your property search tool (or whatever else they might come across while visiting). This includes things such as smooth load times, well organized information architecture, etc.

What about enhancements?

Enhancements are the next best thing. Enhancements usually involve changing or adding functionality to your product, but they don’t necessarily involve new technology. For example, you could add a new feature to your app that allows users to search for white kitchens vs the normal refinements. Or maybe you can figure out a better way to optimize images so they can be displayed on any device without losing quality?

Enhancements are great because they allow you to test out new technology without having to go into full-blown development mode. Some enhancements can make measurable differences in only a couple weeks. You can also utilize CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization), to test enhancements and validate the idea before pushing it to a production environment.

Another advantage of enhancements is that they don’t always require much investment from your company’s budget; usually this type of work is done by developers who already work with the product and know how best get it done with existing toolsets and technologies.

How does a shaky real estate market impact tech spend?

With the current market being what it is, business leaders may be scared to spend. But technology investment can be one of your smartest moves as a company.

It’s important to remember that listings don’t just appear on your site by themselves. Listings are indexed based on when they’re submitted—the faster you get them indexed, the faster you’ll see those properties attract more attention and build traction for your brokerage. The sites that show Coming Soon properties first in search results will become customers go-to brokerage.

Business leaders should not give up on investing in their own brands’ success—especially when there are so many opportunities for technology innovation that will help brokers grow their businesses even during a slower market!

Do prototypes or research spikes early on to determine where to spend your money.

• A prototype is a proof-of-concept that you can use to validate the solution and gain buy-in from others in your organization. This helps you get funding for further development by showing how much value it will bring to the company and its customers.
• A research spike is a quick, cheap way of validating a potential solution before spending money on more extensive development work. It’s also helpful if you don’t have an idea yet about what technology solution would work best for your problems but want to start looking into it anyway.

Conclusion

We hope this post has helped you to think about your own tech spend in the coming year. We know that budgets can be tight, but don’t forget that it’s always better to have a plan than not!