If you’re new to real estate and real estate investing or observe it from the outside, you wouldn’t necessarily think of it as a “technology sector.”
Like most businesses, all real estate professionals use technology to some degree for the sake of productivity alone. They have apps that help them stay productive while on the go. They’re using 360-degree cameras to create more immersive tours for people – something that we really saw take off during the COVID-19 pandemic.
But technology’s integration in the real estate industry is much deeper than that in ways that many people don’t realize. Every day, it helps make investors smarter, offering them more efficient ways to not only find potential investments but also evaluate them and even manage them over the long term.
All told, there are several distinct ways in which technology is making real estate investing smarter, all of which are worth a closer look.
1. Uncovering Contact Information for Faster Opportunities
Real estate investing hinges on finding the right opportunities, and technology has revolutionized how quickly investors can access crucial data—especially when uncovering property owners’ contact information. Traditionally, reaching out to property owners required tedious legwork and a lot of time spent on public records, but now, skip tracing technology makes it faster and more efficient than ever before.
Using skip tracing tools, investors can quickly locate property owners’ contact details, even if the properties aren’t actively listed for sale. This allows you to target owners who might be open to selling but haven’t yet put their property on the market. By tapping into data from public records, social media, and other databases, skip tracing helps you uncover valuable insights, including phone numbers, email addresses, and social media profiles—all in one place.
This instant access to contact information enables investors to reach out directly and make offers before the competition even knows the property is available. Skip tracing technology eliminates the delays in traditional property searches and accelerates the process, giving you a distinct advantage in securing great deals.
2. Advanced Data Analytics Offer Empowering Insight
Similarly, the larger technological field of advanced data analytics can help investors quickly identify high-potential opportunities in a wide range of other ways.
One of the great things about advanced data analytics is that they essentially use the past to inform the future. If you know everything about the history of a particular property, for example, you have all the data you need to look at trends and patterns that other people might miss.
Of course, unless you have powerful and advanced data analytics, a system can take a process that might take days or even weeks for you to complete and distill it down into a few seconds. This insight isn’t just limited to individual properties, either. You can turn the watchful eye of advanced analytics on an entire neighborhood or even market if you’d like, identifying the types of high-potential opportunities that others will either fail to see or won’t get there nearly as quickly as you can.
3. AI-Driven Platforms Simplify and Streamline
Indeed, this segues nicely into one of the major, over-arching ways in which technology is making real estate investing smarter. It takes many important (but menial) tasks and simplifies them, allowing you to get the same results far faster. This frees up valuable time in your day to focus on matters that truly need your attention.
Take property management, for example. Nobody is saying that property management isn’t important – it’s just that it can quickly become a full-time job. This is problematic since “being a successful real estate investor” is already supposed to be your full-time job.
AI-driven platforms can make decisions based on available, objective data far faster than you can, however. Not only does this ensure that the job gets done, but it gets done with higher quality results than you might be capable of on your own.
The same concept applies to deal analysis. Do you want to know whether the deal on the table in front of you is a good one over the long term? Do you want to analyze every variable so that you can mitigate risk as much as possible? On your own, this would take hours or even days to accomplish – and you might still be dealing with human error.
With AI-driven platforms, you’ll know beyond the shadow of a doubt immediately – all to put yourself in a better position to do something about it.
4. The Art of Virtual Property Tours
Finally, we arrive at virtual property tours – something that started as a simple stop-gap solution that has since evolved into something far more sophisticated.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, everything went virtual when people couldn’t gather in small spaces like they would need to during a property tour. Video walk-throughs, 360-degree walk-throughs, and even those augmented by AR and VR became the new norm.
Just because the pandemic has passed us by doesn’t mean we should stop pursuing advancements like this one. Virtual property tours are a great way to enhance engagement through interactive content. You can easily integrate floor plans and potshots, use audio and multimedia elements, and more.
This means that people who may be moving to an area but who haven’t arrived quite yet can tour a property and have a great experience like they would if they were physically there. This allows you to open up the prospective pool of renters or buyers exponentially. This fills properties faster, which generates more revenue for your enterprise, giving you more money to use to capitalize on opportunities as they present themselves.
It’s an excellent position, and it does not require nearly as much money to get off the ground as you probably think it does. The average smartphone that most people carry around with them in their pocket is more powerful than the guidance computers on the craft that sent men to the moon in the 1960s. All it takes is the right tools and a little bit of creativity. Technology can handle the rest.
Technology is Streamlining Real Estate for Investors
These are just a few examples of how technology is transforming real estate investing into a smarter process. The added long-term benefit is that it’s also making it more accessible than ever before.
Even as recently as a decade ago, there was a massive chasm between being a casual “house flipper” and being a true, legitimate investor. Anyone can buy a piece of property, fix it up, and sell it for (hopefully) a profit. Countless people do it every year. It takes a keen eye with the right level of insight, discipline, and ingenuity to turn it into a legitimate career they can succeed at. Simply gathering together the resources alone needed to achieve that made it unreachable for many people.
Until now. As technology makes real estate investing more accessible by essentially leveling the playing field, it makes it more scalable, too. You’re able to move from one level of investment to another with ease, dictated only by your comfort level and long-term goals as opposed to by any lack of access. That, in turn, creates a situation that is far more profitable for investors than ever before, regardless of the type of investor and risk profile that you happen to have.
This has created a perfect storm in many ways, draining much of the cynicism out of the real estate market that used to exist. Instead of only dealing with ultra-wealthy investors, homeowners and prospective home buyers across the country can deal with people who operate at a level where they still have the best interests of their communities at heart.
Conclusion
Considering how technology has closed the gap between amateur and investor even as recently as a decade, it’s truly exciting to think about what the next few years have in store for all of us. This is especially true as many of the technologies outlined above, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, continue to advance rapidly.
There’s a good chance that the real estate industry as it exists five years from now will scarcely resemble the one we know today. Make no mistake about it: that is very much a good thing for most people.
Image Credit: Photo by Breno Assis; Unsplash
