Zillow, with all of its faults, often publishes interesting articles.
A recent example is Behind Every Move Is a Story (Life Events That Influence Decisions to Move).
It is of course no surprise that major life events influence decisions to move – almost 70% of all movers surveyed experienced one or more major “life events” in the previous 12 months.
At the top of this blog, I copied a table from the article to show which events are most significant.
The top five most influential events are: (1) Marriage; (2) Separation/Divorce; (3) New Baby; (4) Retirement; and (5) Graduation.
BIG DATA
What is not stated in the article is how skillfully data analytics companies can now identify likely movers/sellers with the use of hundreds of pieces of data from every source imaginable – newspapers, county records, MLS, social media, etc.
We used to work with a data analytics company called SmartZip b/c they pioneered this field and we were so impressed with their approach (we wanted to use our SmartZip relationship to help our agent partners farm).
SmartZip, however, was probably a bit too early to the game and some of what they offered was not as effective as we had hoped.
I might add that we now have four SmartZip alumni working at JVM, so our relationship with SmartZip definitely proved fruitful but maybe not for the reasons we had hoped. :)
We remain very intrigued with data analytics and are convinced that no agent should ever farm a region or neighborhood without the assistance of an advanced data analytics firm.
Fortunately, there are now numerous other data analytics firms that are much cheaper and much more effective than SmartZip, and I will discuss one such firm in Monday’s blog.
Photo courtesy of: Zillow
Jay Voorhees
Founder/Broker | JVM Lending
(855) 855-4491 | DRE# 01524255, NMLS# 310167
