Importance of Data For Real Estate Brokerages with David Gumpper

Brokerage Insider

Enjoying Brokerage Insider? Please Subscribe Using Your Favorite Podcast Player.

With the large money pouring into the real estate brokerage business, it's more important than ever for brokerages to get their data in order. David Gumpper, CEO of the Gumpper Group, technology consultant for the WAV Group, and former CTO of Michael Saunders and Associates discusses data and business intelligence tools for brokerages.

This episode was recorded live during the Xplode Virtual Conference.

TRANSCRIPTION

Eric Stegemann

Thanks for listening to Brokerage Insider. This week's episode was recorded live during the explode virtual conference on Thursday, September 24th. We look forward to returning to our regular scheduled program soon, but until then enjoy this session. In this episode, we interview David Gumpper, founder of the Gumpper Group, tech consultant with the WAV Group and the former CTO of Michael Saunders real estate in Tampa, Florida. Thanks everybody for joining us. We've got a great room going so far. I'm really excited. David, we were doing the brokerage track here and, and I think like a third or, or a little bit right at a third of the people that were in the opening session have chosen to come join us. So I'm, I'm pretty stowed. I thought we'd have people jumping into the team track and the agent track, and here we are. People actually want to pay attention to what we're going to say today. This is great.

David Gumpper

That's awesome. That's awesome.

Eric Stegemann

Everybody, I am so excited if you, if you do not know David you should David Gumpper, he's first of all, the founder of Gumpper Group which is a consultancy, a tech consultancy, but specializes in the real estate industry. And that's because David has a whole mess of, of experience in this industry. So he used to be the CTO of a one of, if not the largest independent brokerages in the state of Florida Michael Saunders and Company. And he's just an all-around great guy and a data nerd like me. So the first session that we're going to talk about today is brokers and using their data. And I got to tell you, David, I had some questions lined up for us to talk about, and I literally scratched through all of them and started over yesterday because of what happened. So with, with the Zillow news. So I'm excited to talk about that part. But first of all, David, why don't you tell me a little bit, you know, I gave everybody that, that ten second run down, but why don't you give us the, you know, the, the minute or two minute run down of, of your experience?

David Gumpper

Yeah, thanks, Eric. And it's my pleasure to be here and be able to speak at this at this conference. It's, it's really awesome. This is great. Great to see everybody's face and, and put those videos on why not? It's always fun, but a little bit about myself. I've been in technology for, geez. I had 25, 26 years, started out as somebody as a little bit of a with a CAD background, computer aid drafting back in the days for architectural mechanical civil architectural and kind of got into computers because cause of the CAD, I worked for small companies and did not have the resources to be able to get their computers fixed. And for some reason I became the guy that fixed them and kind of went down that road, ended up spending a lot of time getting my different certifications worked in the pharmaceutical field for four or five years before I joined into the real estate world 17 years ago.

So I spent the last 17 years while 14 and a half of it as CTO for Michael Saunders and company in Sarasota, Florida was a member of participated in leading R E or Leading Real Estate Companies of the World on their marketing technology advisory council for many years, as well as chaired it been a part of RESO the real estate standards organization on their board of directors. And now recently over the last two years as chairperson for the broker advisory group. And if I, if I can pitch that right now, I would. So we, we need brokers out there because the whole purpose of the broker advisory work group within the RESO organization is to get feedback is to understand the pain points that brokers are going through today. And being able to see how a standards organization can help minify them, right.

And or, or mitigate them or how standards could make your lives better our lives better, I should say. So there's a shout out to the RESO group and, and the broker advisory group. We do have our conference coming up in at the end of October where we're going to discuss a lot of things and we're discussing a lot about data and streamlining the ability to obtain MLS data. So if you're a brokerage and want to go out into a new market, or you have a new technology partner that's coming in, that's offering a specific product or service into your market, we need to make that whole process more streamlined and more efficient. And we're working on that with the broker advisory group.

Eric Stegemann

And I'm also a member of that broker advisory group with David; I cannot possibly encourage people more to be involved, frankly, folks, if you're a broker in this room, that group helps set the standards for how data works in real estate. And if, if you want to have any control over how your vendors connect up and get data from MLS or share data back and forth between each other this is the venue to do that. And it is not terribly expensive to join RESO the real estate standards organization become a member and attend their events. So I highly encourage you to be part of the conversation because otherwise it's, it's mostly just MLS folks talking back and forth, and it departments, a lot of times they don't have that experience to know, you know, they haven't been a day in life of the shoes of a, of a brokerage. They don't have the

David Gumpper

Right, that's what this group is for, is to give them the insight

Eric Stegemann

If they want it, they are looking for advice that they don't always get. So, so please come and join that new Craig. I just saw your chat about that. We'll make sure we post in the chat. It's RESO, RESo.org is the , is the website. If you want to go become a member of RESO and then they have a monthly meeting, the broker advisory group meets, I think, monthly, and then they have their, their big sessions twice a year. So but without further ado David let's, let's jump into the, the nitty gritty here. So, you know, obviously I'm going to talk to you about broker data. And so, you know, yesterday was Zillow had their announcement. And I think from the text messages I got yesterday and, and the Facebook messages and that, and the, you know, every single one of our clients that try TRIBUS, I'm pretty sure most of the brokerages that drivers reached out to me and sent me some sort of message saying either what do I do?

Or Zillow's the devil or you know, it's to be determined yet. And I think, you know, from that perspective, the Mo the, the single unifying thing that I heard yesterday was brokers yesterday was the rallying cry. The wakeup call to brokers needs to do things with their own data. Everybody, it seemed like I spoke with yesterday, said, you know, I know you ha you know, TRIBUS, we have this data warehouse product and they know that it's there, but, but brokers in general, I think they understood, Hey, it's time to make sure I have all my own data. So, you know, we're for a broker that's sitting here listening to this, whether they're two people, 200 people, or 2000 people, David, where do you, where do you think they should start in terms of saying, I don't know, but I know I need to make sure I have my own data. Where do they start?

David Gumpper

The first place you got to start is to look at where the data is, take a look at the different systems that you have and understand what the relationships are to those systems. So you really need to kind of do a data audit at the end of the day, to see where the data is, what the domain of the data, in other words, what does it mean to you and to your business, and then kind of and then at that point, decide how and what you're going to do with the data come up with your own use cases. But it's really important to even just from a privacy standpoint, because even with the California consumer privacy act and the GDPR, one of the things that you're responsible for and, and a lot of us are probably, unless you're a very large brokerage are not really confined to having to, to comply to those privacy laws. But at the end of the day, it's just a real good thing to do and, and to practice. So you really need to know where your data is and then how's it being used, who's using it. So essentially you have really got it. The first step for me is to take a T is to do a data audit, just go around through your systems and start auditing and documenting what the, what data you do have.

Eric Stegemann

Can you provide just a couple of examples of things that brokers may not be thinking about? So I think when brokers, when I've had these conversations with them, I think most of them know, Hey, I need to make sure that I have my, my client data and my transactional data, but is there anything else that they should be worried about collecting?

David Gumpper

Yeah. I mean, it's your lead data, right? Where leads coming from how many leads do you have? Who's getting those leads. It's your CRM data. So it's customer and client information interactions with the data. You, how many of you are using email platforms like MailChimp and constant contact and so forth. You have a lot of data in there that can be taken out. So as you can see it in any kind of SAS pro product that you are using in your business is really a source for that data. And then there's external data that, that brokerages should also get, and that's probably a separate topic in itself, but you know, I mean you know, social media is a, is a channel where there is some data that, that can be gleaned and, and, and stored and used from a broker standpoint. But but yeah, definitely any kind of sass product has data in it. So I don't care what it is, even your spreadsheets. I mean, I, we work with a data that's in CSV files that are sitting in, in your, your file system, in your was Microsoft one drive or Google drive or Dropbox, or box.net or any in those storage's. So that's all, that's all data that you have, and that's where, and it's from any kind of different source.

Eric Stegemann

And David, we got a question from the chat room that I just saw and, you know, you and I are our data let's step back for just a second SAS, by the way you know, that is software as a service. So if you're a broker you know, you probably have various tools like a brokerage website, a CRM, an email marketing platform, a transaction management system and accounting system. That's always a big one. Those types of tools, you probably use third parties for all of those tools. And so what David is talking about here is making sure you go to all of these vendors that you have reduced software as a service have vendors and communicate with them and say, Hey, I need to get my data. And I think David, I don't want to put too many words in your mouth, but, but, you know, and I'm biased on this, but, you know, I think it collects everything and then go from there is kind of what

David Gumpper

Exactly it's, you need to do the data audit so that you know, what data you have before, you can even start to think about what you're going to do with it. And, and, and the easiest way to

Find out where that data is, is to take a look at your expense reports, take a, you know, a year snapshot of your expenses and just go down, gee, this is software I use. This is software I use is a software. That's your first step. And, and, and on a note on that, that's another way to go take a look at what are you using versus what you're not using on a expense report and start to mitigate some of those expenses out of your bottom line.

Eric Stegemann

Well, there's another thing that I talk about all the time is, you know, looking at tools and just figuring out adoption rates and something, you know, try this we're we have a 44% adoption rate on average. That means eat every agent logs into our system, at least one time a week, 44% of all of our agents log in at least one time a week. And when we've looked at these audits with some of our broker customers, what we've realized is that the average adoption of most broker provided tools, depending on the tool, but most broker provide tools hovers in the sub 10% range. And so then as a broker, you know, you need to make these decisions. Do I do I need to teach you need to keep paying for this, or is this something that I should I should be worrying about or not.

And in fact, right after David's session here, I'm going to be talking about some of those metrics and adoption rates and you, how you can use tech as a recruiting tool, but the mistakes that a lot of brokers make. So I'm going to have that session right before break. So, you know, we talked about getting the data we talked about, you know, making sure that you just figure out all the data that you have, let's start talking about what to do with the data once you've collected it. So obviously first that, you know, figure out what's their second step what do we do with the data? So let let's David, let's say we've got all of our client data, we've got our transaction data. We've even got our agent and production data. We've got all of that now in these CSV files, where do we go next?

David Gumpper

Yeah. there's a lot of different tools out there that you can go next, but from a Brokerage standpoint, it's to once you have it all when you have all that data, that from a Brokerage perspective, it's really to look at what your objectives are at the end of the day. What's, what's going to be important for your business because just having the data isn't going to do anything, you really have to outline what your use cases are. And what a use case is, is, is really what an objective is. What, what do you want to do with, what do you want to do as part of your business? Then we can go in and say, okay, how can the technology, or how can the data help you accomplish that? If it's retention, if it's recruiting, if it's production, which I considered the three pillars of most brokerages, when you evaluate, you know, the success of, of, of different projects or even initiatives within a Brokerage you want to have those objectives really outlined, very clear.

So because it's really about, it's not take, it's not doing it the other way. I've seen people try to say, Oh, let me go have though this data, now let's go see what we can do with it. No, let's sit down and have a heart to heart, talk and discussion on what is it that you want your business to do? Where, where do you see the deficiencies? Where are the gaps? Where do you need to be better at where, what are you, what are you the best at? Because that's important to know, because then we want to take a look at the data. That's helping you being the best at that. And then we find out what those objectives are. And then we map that data to look at the data and see how that data can help provide success in that, in those objects.

Eric Stegemann

And I think all too often, most brokerages, unless you're a fairly large sized organization. A lot of times I see they don't have those objectives in place. You know, I hear that the objective is I want more real estate. Right. And we'll obviously, okay, well, that's the obvious one. We want to make more money. Otherwise, why are we doing this? Right, exactly. But, but at the end of the day, you have to have the individual objective to say, what can you tackle? I mean, there's that old saying that, which is measured, is improved, right. And if you don't know what you're measuring you don't know how to tackle it. I think you get into Lala land and then you're putting offices everywhere. This is something we saw back in Oh six and Oh seven is we put an office anywhere and recruit and, you know, have a a hundred, 200, $300,000 of expenses a year for that office. And, and have it not net paid off, but put it there just to put it there and have a presence. Right?

David Gumpper

Correct. Yep.

Eric Stegemann

Go ahead. Go ahead, David.

David Gumpper

Yeah, I was just going to just iterate on that again, is that it's, it's really important to sit down and have a heart to heart talk. And it's not that I want to increase my business, but it's, how do you want to increase your business? Where can you increase your business? What can increase your business? So you really got to go down deep into what, and it also understands what, what is, what has made your business successful as well? Cause you, you can't build objectives around something that's already been successful, but maybe it can be better. But the idea is to find out this is how you became successful. Where are your gaps? What are you missing? What do you need to really look at? And it's a, it's a deep discussion. It's a heart to heart talk. And sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it takes it's a little bit over time, but you also have to have that discussion.

Not only, you know, you should have it with your leadership of your brokerage as well, too. And sometimes it's great to have a third party in there to have that conversation. Cause they'll hear things and listen to things and come up with a different viewpoint or different perspective. I can't tell you how many times, you know, yesterday I sat in a, a brokerage listening to six people in a brokerage talk about training. And at the end of the day it was, I heard one thing about training and I said, why are, why are we not looking at this opportunity to do it this way? And all of a sudden, everybody just, they all, like, I don't know, it sounds good. Let's, let's try it. What can we do? How do we do it? And then we went from there and created a process and, and as a strategic plan to move forward on that with tweaks naturally you know, cause nobody's a hundred percent perfect. It's, it's the collaboration of, of everyone that really helps make the objectives and strategic initiatives.

Eric Stegemann

Yeah. I mean, it's, you don't know what you don't know if you haven't collected the data and that's why the first step, and then you can start working...