Network Update

Our data platforms are providing us with insights on our activity and performance that we dreamed about having only a few years ago. The information covers nearly all aspects of our work, including lead generation and appraisal conversion, to auction bidders and days on market, to sales and market share, and so on. It extends to property management, administration and profitability. Presented digitally and constantly being updated automatically, these insights can be accessed from anywhere at any time.

The data we now collect through the recently released NurtureCloud buyer module has taken us to new horizons. We can now illustrate the work we are doing with buyers to achieve the best possible results for our vendor clients, and ensure that we are maximising new listing opportunities through this buyer work. Importantly, it proves to our clients that as the largest real estate group with the best technology, we will create the most competition for them. Our data platforms are now a point of difference in living rooms.

Our data not only shows us what has happened, but also what works best, and also what might happen in the future. From the very precise insights, like what time is best to make your buyer call backs and which of your customers are likely to come to market in the next few months, to more complex areas such as what markets should we be focusing on to grow our business, and what profit benchmarks leaders should be aiming for throughout their leadership journey. We can predict with a very high degree of accuracy what our group monthly sales value will be one to two months in advance.

In addition to the value provided to customers, these insights provide all of our leaders with the opportunity to make better decisions and lead their teams. A popular phrase in business books is “what gets measured gets done”. It implies that if we can set targets for activity, and we know they’re being measured, we are much more likely to work hard to hit them. We are motivated to achieve peak performance by setting targets that encourage us to challenge our potential but don’t overwhelm us with pressure. It encourages us to expand our teams and delegate responsibility for certain activities because we are confident we will know if they are
being done.

Our leaders can also signal what is important to them by relentlessly displaying and communicating to their teams the information that is most important to them. In the meeting rooms of our own corporate offices, the TV screens now display rotating charts selected from our internal data platform by our local leaders to illustrate the metrics they are most curious about and/or focussed on improving. Of course, we aren’t saying that anything that cannot be readily quantified is valueless. The phrase “not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts” is one of my favourites. This is especially relevant to us and our
industry, where much of what we provide to our members and customers is an experience.

We do a lot of our work in the “not everything that counts can be counted” world. We have always said the future of our group is defined by the ambition of our leaders to build fine businesses of which they can be proud. The same goes for the family experience we seek to provide our members to support and nurture that ambition, as well as the way in which we challenge each other to keep growing. The importance of these things are not diminished by the fact that they are hard to measure, and so we consistently search and listen for as much evidence of their health, or lack thereof, as we can find.

And then there are things we can measure but the numbers don’t tell the whole story. Let’s take prospecting. We know how important it is. There is endless amounts of NurtureCloud data to both assist us maximise our opportunity and effectiveness, and measure how much prospecting we are doing. But it doesn’t measure how good our calls are, how much energy we are bringing to this work, or what our clients think about the conversations. Our most recent Real Estate of Origin event was
another important instalment of the REOO tradition, illustrating again that leadership, teamwork and creativity are what matters most.