Technology is advancing in commercial real estate and its only a matter of time before new opportunities take hold of the industry, according to the Imprev Thought Leadership Survey released at Inman Connect on Tuesday.
The study polled nearly 200 real estate professionals across the country and found that the industry is anticipating big opportunities from predictive analytics, big data and marketing automation over the next five years. The survey showed less confidence in technology such as artificial intelligence, augmented realty and virtual realty 3D tours.
Nearly 74 percent of respondents bet that predictive analytics will dominate the brokerage industry and called the technology “crucial” to the workplace. Big data ranks second for respondents, but one broker-owner indicated on the survey that the integration of different systems and aggregation of data of multiple sources is critical to making this tech work in the industry.
The study also indicated that most agree that portals, such as Zillow or realtor.com, are becoming increasingly less important. Only 20 percent of respondents thought they would still be important five years from now. Instead about half of respondents believe that mobile apps, social media and video will be much more important than portals.
Respondents were also highly motivated to begin measuring the effectiveness of their marketing with more accuracy over the next five years. More than half hoped to increase this aspect and about a third already had tools in place to better measure their ROI. Print advertising in newspapers and magazines was rated to be the least important real estate marketing channel in the next five years. However, leaving print advertising is a difficult task, especially in rural areas, one executive noted on the survey.
The survey was created by Imprev, an automated marketing service, and conducted in June 2017.
