After over a decade working in various areas of the real estate industry, including in investment and construction management, Roy Dekel has deep knowledge of the industry and the areas where technology could make improvements. Hence his role as CEO of SetSchedule, a technology company that matches real estate agents with homeowners looking to sell and home buyers in search of the perfect house.
The Importance of Leads
In addition to real estate experience, Roy Dekel also has extensive experience in sales management, and knows the importance of valuable leads in any sales-based industry. For most industries, leads involve looking for someone who is ready to buy, but for real estate agents, you need to find people who are ready to sell. This can be challenging, because home buying and selling is usually tied to life milestones. Most people only own one home at a time, and only sell when they are ready to move on.
How do you know when someone is ready to move on? A lot of lead generation in real estate comes from word of mouth — a friend’s brother’s cousin is relocating for his job and needs to sell his house, that sort of thing. But relying on a large network of friends and family to send people your way only goes so far. Likewise, advertising will help you reach people who are actively preparing to sell their house. But how do you find people who are still thinking about selling but haven’t started their search for an agent yet?
Enter the advanced technology of artificial intelligence and machine learning. SetSchedule’s algorithm analyzes the current real estate market and the historic performance of the region as well as the individual sales history of each home, and many other factors, to determine which homes are likely to go on the market soon, and how much they could potentially sell for.
Armed with these leads, real estate agents can contact home buyers and help them make the decision to put their home on the market.
Machine Learning Never Stops
The great thing about machine learning is that the artificial intelligence just gets better over time. The more data an algorithm receives, the more refined its results become. Over time, SetSchedule will only get better at identifying and recommending leads, as the AI continues to get to know local real estate conditions in each market. It’s the wonder of living in the 21st century — our technological capabilities continue to grow by leaps and bounds, at a previously unprecedented rate. These advances can only help industries as they automate and streamline many of the processes that humans previously had to handle with a combination of mind-numbing number crunching and educated guesswork.
It takes the leadership of someone like Roy Dekel to see the possibilities for a company like SetSchedule to bring the latest technological advances to an industry like real estate. It truly shows the value of gaining experience in different industries, in order to see the overlap and synergy in each industry’s needs and how they can serve each other.