You know, as I’ve said before, it’s one thing to capture a lead. But the real trick in this business is to get the lead coming back to my client’s search site over and over and over again. We obsess about statistics, statistics like what percentage of the time do they come back to a listing alert. What percentage of the time do they click through? How many homes do they look at on the second time if they visit the site? How long are they there? What’s their length of stay, right? The time and the visit.

All of these statistics are really, really important. I think about three major ways of cultivating, nurturing, incubating leads. We’re helping our clients do that. We’ve already talked about listing alerts, right? A lot of people do listing alerts. But the old school way is very static. You remember their first search. Keep getting them homes there and it’s just a static experience. The future as I said before, it’s dynamic. It’s watching the consumer search behavior change and having the listing alerts being very responsive and really targeted to what they’re searching for now and if they’ve changed from looking at condos in the city center to looking at single family homes in the suburbs, the listing alerts need to change as well. So we’ve talked about that.

The second really, really cool thing that we’re doing are these intelligent behavioral communications and this is using algorithms, artificial intelligence to automatically notice when the consumer search activity is getting elevated when they’re saving searches, when they’re tagging homes as favorites, when they’re looking at homes more than three or four times. That’s a huge cue. We want to send an automated message to you that they’ve looked at a home three or four times. But we also want to send an automated text right to the consumer. Hey, I’ve noticed you’ve looked at 123 Main Street four times. Would you like to go see the home or can I send you a few more homes that match that home exactly? Really, really cool stuff. So we can look at six, seven, eight different behaviors that would elicit basically an automated text response.

Now we never, never want to over-text consumers. You never want consumers thinking that they’re on these automated drip campaigns. We think that’s the past. We want them every once in a while when it’s right, to get a little text from our agent that seems very personal and is a call to action.

When all of a sudden my client – when my Ylobo client gets a response on their cell phone and says, “Yes, I would like to go see 124 Main Street,” my client loves it because they didn’t do anything. The system did it for them automatically. So, intelligent behavioral communications is number two.

Number three, which is really exciting is the shift that we’re seeing in what we call “remarketing and retargeting”. A lot of real estate tech companies out there that talk about remarketing and retargeting. But they’re really doing it in an old school way, which is getting your brand back in front of the consumer when the consumer is online in their Facebook news feed or they’re on ESPN.com or CNN.com, wherever they are. But that’s really generic, right? We have all this data. Why aren’t we using it? We know exactly where they’re searching, what towns, what price range, what type of structure. We have all this data. Why don’t we use it?

So when we go back and remarket or retarget to that consumer, why are we just getting our brand? Sure, let’s get our brand. But let’s wrap that brand around a specific new home on the market that matches their search requests exactly. So if that consumer in your area is looking for a single family home, three bedrooms plus, between $400,000 and $500,000 and we know that, shame on us if in our remarketing message we don’t show them a new home in the market. That’s $450,000, three bedrooms plus, right in the towns that they’re looking and that’s what we can do now.

The analogy would be you guys all notice that sometimes maybe you’ve looked at shoes or you’ve looked at cars and then all of a sudden, lo and behold a week later, you’re online searching and there’s the shoe, right? Or there’s the car. But specifically, what if we got more granular?

What happens if – not only did we just see a message from let’s say Amazon generically about a specific sort of type of shoe. But what about if it’s an actual dollar offer on a specific brand of shoe that we looked at, look like? That offer came from a shoe store that was five minutes away. That’s how granular remarketing and retargeting is getting and that’s how granular it should get in our world in the world of real estate technology.