Chicagoland brokerage Baird & Warner has begun displaying buyer activity data on its website through an integration with Buyside, the Pennsylvania-based data analytics and marketing company.
Announced earlier this week, the integration could help the brokerage’s agents make more convincing cases to seller clients for price cuts while potentially paving the way for Baird & Warner to double-end more deals, although the brokerage insists that’s not a goal.
“Our new Buyside platform delivers market insights never before available to Chicagoland consumers,” said Baird & Warner Executive Vice President Laura Ellis in a statement. Baird & Warner says it has 2,400 broker associates spread across 28 offices in the Chicago area.
Buyside will collect data on buyers engaging with Baird & Warner listings, both on the brokerage’s website and through Zillow, Trulia and other listing portals.
The listing traffic data from Zillow and Trulia comes through Buyside’s use of Zillow’s application programming interfaces (APIs), according to Kate Downen, director of industry relations at Zillow. Specifically, the data includes listing search results views and listing page views for the brokerage’s listings on Zillow and Trulia, plus inquiries made on those listings, according to Dean Rouso, vice president of sales at Baird & Warner.
Thanks to the enhancements from Buyside, visitors to Baird & Warner’s website will be able to view three home value estimates for an address, heat maps representing buyer demand and the number of buyers searching for a home’s area and price range.
It also will serve up “supply-side trends to help price a home with the help of an agent, including homes sold per quarter in ZIP code, and median sale price and homes sold in the current quarter,” Baird & Warner said in a statement.
The brokerage’s website users can also see its “coming soon” listings — those not yet posted in the MLS.
One of Buyside’s selling points is that it can help brokerages “close more transaction sides in-house,” as a description of Buyside in the Baird & Warner announcement puts it. This is possible in part by importing buyer profiles from popular customer relationship management systems (CRMs). Buyside can match a brokerage’s listings with the brokerage’s buyer clients and some of these matches can be made for listings before they are inputted in the MLS.
“Similar to weekly office meetings, we notify listing agents of agents with matching buyers,” Rouso said. “We also notify buyer agents of agents with new matching listings.”
But Rouso added that double-ending more deals was actually not a goal of the Buyside integration.
“The goal in part is to create a heat map so a seller can visualize the demand of their home in a particular area at certain price points,” he said.
By arming agents with rich buyer data, Buyside’s partnership with Baird & Warner can also help them make more compelling listing presentations.
In addition, it could help agents make more convincing cases for a price cut. Buyside does this by estimating how many more active buyers would see a home if its price was snipped by $25,000, Inman reported.
“We’re confident Baird & Warner will experience a considerable competitive market advantage – and that both sellers and buyers will reap the benefits as well,” said Buyside CEO Charles Williams IV in a statement.
