Are you fascinated by real estate technology and industry trends? Are you a real estate agent looking to grow your professional network with industry leaders? Well Inman Connect provides all of the above as it celebrates its 20th anniversary in San Francisco. Attendees can expect a premier event that will bring together executives from top real estate franchises, renowned real estate agents and brokers, and executives from major financial service companies to deliver three days of thought-provoking speaker sessions. Connect events are held each year and provide information that is tailored to an audience of real estate agents and tech startups who are looking to converge in the lucrative real estate industry.
At the end of the day, it’s about finding the right home for the right buyer and thanks to the emergence of tech startups, we are seeing an unparalleled age of endless possibilities for growth in the industry. Attendees will be fascinated by the rows of fantastic exhibits showcasing session speakers who want to network with people just like you and are open to sharing personal stories of their successes and failures. There will also be numerous tech startup exhibits that provide a window into the future of the industry with applications that feature virtual tours of homes, advanced lead generation and much more! This year’s Inman Connect is set to be its best with many startups coming from nearby Silicon Valley, home of the greatest tech minds in the world.
Inman Connect San Francisco 2016
This year’s Connect event in San Francisco runs from Aug. 2-5, it will be geared towards delivering more valuable takeaways and providing a revamped session format, in addition to more networking opportunities. A wide range of enthusiastic and knowledgeable session speakers will be separated into two categories: “practical business takeaways” and “market, economic and technology trends” from inside and outside the real estate industry. The presentations will be short, but impactful and will be either in the form of one-on-one Q&As, small panel discussions, or a hands-on learning lab.
There will be a plenty of insightful topics discussed on the future of the industry, including new technologies in real estate such as artificial intelligence, 3D and virtual reality. There will also be discussions on using Facebook, Google, Zillow and Realtor.com, with Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff in attendance providing his own insight.
Inman Connect 2016 will have many firsts, including a mobile app specifically for Inman Connect that provides enhanced networking capabilities and learning labs that provide interactive, deep dives into the hottest industry topics. There will also be a new and inspiring Master of Ceremonies Leigh Brown, an award-winning Re/Max franchise owner from Charlotte, N.C. who has spoken at 68 speaking events around the world.
How it all Started
American entrepreneur Bradley Inman has become a leader in the world of real estate, having been at the helm of several innovative companies and in the process has become a thought leader in the industry. Inman began his career as housing policy analyst, while also writing a syndicated real estate column for the San Francisco Examiner.
Inman is an award-winning journalist with 33 years of experience in the real estate industry. He’s launched and led several companies over the years, most notably HomeGain.com, a lead generation firm he sold in 2005; TurnHere.com, an Internet video production and distribution platform for online advertising; Vook, a technology platform that produces interactive media content for tablets; and was an early investor in the widely popular New York-based Curbed.com and served as its chairman.
Inman is also a gifted speaker, participating in several engagements across the country and has been a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley for their School of Journalism.
In 1983, Inman founded Inman News, a daily news source for the real estate industry. Starting small at first, the site has grown to become the leading independent real estate news outlet in the U.S. The site specializes in highlighting the convergence of technology and the real estate industry with a focus on lead generation and improving the overall home buying experience.
In 1996, Inman launched Inman Connect as a place of congregation for the brightest minds in the real estate industry and up-and-coming entrepreneurs. Connect has since become a massive success in its 20 years because its foundation is built on of making everyone who attends a smarter businessperson through challenging everything they know, while also looking towards the future.
The real estate industry is dependent on acquiring high quality leads, but Justin Shum, founder of the live chat system ReadyChat, says it’s not about opening the top funnel, but rather optimizing conversion through customer service is the key to success.
ReadyChat began in 2013, it has since become a leading live chat service for the real estate industry with a pay-per-lead business model. He saw the need for improvement in the process of home buying, especially the frustration involved in finding the right realtor.
“Live chat has been around for decades and a lot of the tech out there is open source, but what is unique about this channel for real estate specifically is that real estate has always been a seller-consumer relationship business,” says Toronto-based Shum. “When it comes to the online world, everything is very self-served and listings have been commoditized where you can go to any site and get listings, it used to empower [buyers], but now it’s just commoditized.”
Shum’s vision for his live chat software was a system that would be intuitive and could monitor the behavior of visitors to a site then identify the best time to engage with the potential lead.
“So how do these businesses really differentiate, how do they compete, now it’s about service and it’s about experience, so live chat brings a refreshed outlook and service level to the real estate vertical, especially online where it lacks one-to-one interaction, it lacks human engagement, it lacks friendly customer service,” Shum says. “It’s ironic because real estate is so customer service centric, but it’s not carried over to the online world where a majority of business and leads are generated.”
In just three years, ReadyChat has acquired over 500 real estate offices and brokerages that have implemented his live chat system as part of their online marketing efforts to manage their customer engagement channels. Today, over 30,000 Realtors receive ReadyChat leads.
ReadyChat utilizes highly competent agents that engage visitors with this proven 4-step process:
1. Engage – Determine the right moment to send a welcome message and offer customer service
2. Interact – To determine whether they are buying or selling and how soon
3. Delight – Answer inquiries politely and accurately
4. Convert – Provide contact information and a time to chat by phone
This simple, but effective process has made ReadyChat a leader in live chat systems and holds some of the highest quality leads in the industry with an average connection rate of over 80 percent and has an impressive closing rate of 7.5 percent, while the industry average is only 2.5 percent. Unfortunately, most businesses accept 2.5 percent as the best they can do.
Shum says the trick to finding success in the real estate industry is not to raise the budget at the top of the marketing funnel to yield more leads, but to make the best use of the visitors a site already receives. He sees the future of tech in general as one that prioritizes user experience and Shum credits this model to the rise of Uber’s ride hailing app that is revolutionizing the taxi industry.
Thankfully, the real estate industry dwarfs the taxi industry in terms of revenue, and events such as Inman Connect show agents and realtors that the opportunities provided by startup tech companies are limitless. Advancements in 3D and virtual reality are showing that shopping for a home online can be an intimate experience and making a digital emotional connection is proving to be the future of the real estate industry.
The Future is Mobile
The information age is driving the overhaul of the traditional model of realtor and home buyer to one that has the buyer holding all the power as90 percent of all home searches start online because everyone has all the listings and realtors/agencies right at their fingertips. Realtors are well aware of this because 60 percent of them actually prospect for leads daily, while 26 percent devote several hours a day – a clear sign of a broken marketing funnel.
To stand out among the sea of choices a home buyer has online, it requires proactive initiatives by diversifying the leads they target – specifically mobile users. Mobile use is a crucial trend to follow as half of all home buyers in the U.S. use a mobile device to look for listings, according to a 2015 survey of buyers by the National Association of Realtors.
So far in 2016, 65% of all online traffic comes from mobile devices and mobile apps, which is up from 50 percent a year ago. It’s easy to believe with roughly two billion smartphones in use around the world, but it makes it harder to find high quality leads as well as being able to compete for this potential “gold mine” lead source.
“Geo-location and proximity sensing has become quite popular with real estate search apps. However, the old ways of searching by filter on a mobile device and having to scroll through endless pages of listings is highly inefficient and time consuming for mobile users. This [is because it] was built for desktop, not mobile. That is also why chat and conversational interfaces have gained popularity amongst mobile users as of late; the ability to ask and then receive information is much more efficient than hunting and scrolling with today’s mobile real estate search tools,” Shum said.
Instant messaging platforms have not lost their popularity since the days of AIM and MSN Messenger, they have just evolved. For example, the Facebook-owned WhatsApp reached 1 billion active monthly users in February of this year. This stat is no surprise to millennials who grew up with instant messaging and have not lost their affinity for keypad communication.
For realtors, this is a trend that needs to be capitalized on because it will continue as millennials become the largest demographic in the U.S. and will someday soon command the real estate market. They will also eclipse baby boomers in spending power at $3.39 trillion by 2018.
Once you have a lead on your website, you should consider adding a live chat system such as ReadyChat who will provide around the clock, seven days a week instant messaging support to potential leads and provide them with the information they need directly through their experienced sales team. Websites have evolved dramatically in the last decade, therefore if you want to stay ahead of the competition, you must utilize website design to ‘wow’ a lead immediately in order to maximize your sales.
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