This post by Bryan Robertson, real estate broker/owner at Catarra Real Estate in Los Altos, Calif., was originally published on ActiveRain

In the 21st century, data is, literally, everywhere. It’s generated every time you buy groceries, surf the Web, or even just drive down the street. Nearly everything you do creates data. That data you create gets used to give you coupons on new products, suggest a Web page, or how to bypass traffic. You, as an individual, create tons of data with every card swipe, button push, or browser click. All that data is the foundation of what many refer to as “big data.”

A whole consumer picture

Big data is the basis for business intelligence, which is about taking all that information and turning it into knowledge to drive better business decisions. Whether it’s data about retail consumers or homebuyers, it’s all the same game.

The business intelligence industry has been analyzing large data sets in corporations for years — decades, really. It’s only now coming to the real estate industry. Wal-Mart had one of the first terabyte data warehouses (big data repository) in the late 1990s — one of the largest in the world at the time. The concept of the data warehouse was a subset of product sales and customer profile data that allowed Wal-Mart to know what to sell and whom to sell it to. It helped shape the course of its business and make billions. That’s big data and how it’s used.

Big data is all about being informed — about who we are, what we do and why — 24/7.

If you look up the definition of the term “big data” on the Web, you’ll see it defined as a data set so large that it’s difficult to analyze using readily available tools. Don’t believe it. The amount of data used in the real estate industry isn’t that large. A single major retailer will generate more sales data in a year than the entire real estate industry will in a decade. However, it’s all relative, and the real estate industry is still trying to figure out what data it has, let alone how to use it.

The point is that big data in real estate is about presenting a “whole consumer” picture. It’s about using data to find out who buys what, when, where, why and how. It’s about finding out who will sell a house — when, where, why and how.

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