The term Big Data has been thrown around for many years and it can be a daunting task when one is tasked to understand it. During REHDA Institute’s workshop called Utilising Key 2016 NAPIC Data In Understanding Property sales trends, Haresh Khoobchandani, CEO, iProperty.com Malaysia and Singapore sees it as a way to help businesses find efficiencies in places they either didn’t think of or couldn’t gain access to previously. It gives market leaders the opportunity go from a hunch to a certainty.
“I dare say that most companies either don’t understand, capture and analyse data to turn them into insights. More than 90% of the companies in the world are struggling with this. What I want to do is to teach people how data flow across leadership, sales and market so that they can make data-driven decisions,” he said.
This is why no one should be confused when it comes to utilising data for the property industry. Haresh equated this like applying science into art making it a mix of creativity and information.
“For example, someone can say that they feel a particular person is not happy with the property. With sentiment analysis, you can translate such feelings into figures like that person is 80% unhappy about the property. From there, you can target various influences to decrease the unhappiness to 50%. That’s one of the beauties of going digital,” said Haresh.
Property businesses could achieve a lot more if they leveraged all possible data existing on both the supply and demand side of the equation. This means having the ability to spot trends such as where property is most in demand, most needed and most valued.
“Ironically, iProperty.com is not a property company, instead, we are a digital company. We have different media types to complement our digital offering. However, we serve one industry which is the property industry. This is where we can make data accessible to people via iPropertyiQ.com as you can analyse millions of terabytes of data in split seconds to make the right decisions,” he added.
According to Haresh, from iProperty.com’s standpoints, the company looks at the Five V’s of Big Data. First off is the Volume of data whereby the amount of data being created in the last five years is more than the amount of data that has been created from the last 50 years. There is more information than people can consume.
“Then, Velocity is where the speed of data is being created. As for Variety, it can tell different types of data being generated like structured data, which is numbers and unstructured data, which is sentiments. This is followed by Veracity of data meaning the trustworthiness of data in terms of accuracy and finally turning data into Value,” explained Haresh.
Once the Five V’s of Big Data are put into action, Haresh said that it can help in many ways like building better relationships with customers. Companies can target and personalise interactions using the digital footprints left by online users to engage customers in meaningful ways.
“For example, you can be looking at a property in Genting. By taking into account the other details you were looking at, we can even factor in facts like condominiums that are 1,000 sq ft and above because you’ve seen this elsewhere. This massive algorithm at the backend has started calculating and it is extremely valuable to developers,” added Haresh.
Further, there is a difference between obvious information and data-driven conversation. This is why Haresh is pushing for a data-driven culture within an organisation because this is a thing of the future. The heart of a good digital company is the ability to understand data.
“Armed with this knowledge, developers can identify their target audience, focus on when to market, plan ahead for their next development, able to discover new insights, predict outcomes in real time, and build developments that cater to the needs of property buyers. We are extending our hand to developers to provide them access to data that can help them make impactful decisions in real time,” said Haresh.
