Metrics & Analytics - The importance of professionals

In every real estate company, at any given moment, there are numerous deals on the table, in different stages of development which need to be tracked. Managers and brokers need to be able to readily assess where each deal stands and where each deal is headed. Real estate professionals are constantly asking the same questions; How many people have shown interest in our listing? How many times has our listing been shown? How many offers do we have on the table? How many leases or contracts are out, and at what stage? Our developers are continuously hard at work building and implementing new features and capabilities with the goal of creating value for our users by helping them answer these questions so they can continuously assess the progress on their deals. We constantly ask ourselves: What data is important to our users and their clients? Why is this data important? and How can we help our users make decisions based on the data? Agorafy understands that professionals need to be able to track the overall market as well as their individual activity and performance. Brokers don't have time to waste on activities that don't produce results and they rely on metrics to monitor their progress and make adjustments if necessary. Agorafy is launching advanced tools which will go beyond accurate real estate data and address the metrics that professionals need to know. Listing Metrics Take basic metrics on the average exclusive listing. The broker handling the exclusive needs to track and measure all of the potential interest in the space, the number of showings, and the feedback on pricing from both tenants and brokers, "the market." These metrics have traditionally been tracked internally which is time consuming and not always accurate. By utilizing the features on our site professionals gain a valuable tool for easy and consistent self-assessment. Our listing metrics will help our users in this process by clueing them into how many times and how often their listings our viewed on our system, the type of user viewing their listings, and how often their listing is being viewed relative to other competing spaces in the neighborhood. Listing metrics will help them track their progress marketing the space, and let them know if a change of course is necessary in order to get more exposure and more offers on the space. Being able to constantly track these metrics will allow for both internal assessment and enable them to report back to their client. Deals move fast and in order for professionals to focus on the activities that produce results, every undertaking needs to be tracked and measured. As conventional wisdom says we can't manage what we can't measure. Metrics empower real estate professionals to monitor their performance and make corrections. They can also simplify the process and can help remove emotion, uncertainty, and anxiety from the equation. Market Analytics We want our users to have the ability to extract valuable information from Agorafy that goes far beyond just searching for listings and running listing reports. When launched our market analytics will help our users track average asking prices across office, retail, and residential listings for every neighborhood in New York. Across our system we track every data point imaginable so that we can provide further insights to our users. Being able to analyze vast amounts of search data we are able to identify the most popular neighborhoods and identify trends up or down in interest over months and quarters. Our market metrics are also able to track other search characteristics such as average space range, average pricing range, the most subscribed to neighborhoods, and the most viewed listings in each neighborhood. These market metrics will be available to provide context when users run market reports for commercial or residential space. In the coming months we are looking to expand our platform beyond accurate and real time real estate data and begin to provide our users with the powerful tools and features they need to track and make decisions based on the data. Richard Du is the founder and CEO of Agorafy, New York, N.Y.