Personalize services to compete with AI

REAL estate brokers must learn to use various digital tools if they want to remain relevant in today’s high-tech real estate industry.

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is here, the only chance for us not to become obsolete is to personalize our services,” said Grace Granlund, president of Getmore.ph.

She advised real estate brokers and sales agents to continue building professional relationships and render personalized services with their clients, as this is an area that cannot be done by AI yet.

“The emotional side is our strength. People will seek our services, because buying homes especially those high-ticket items are big life decisions. They will not buy it from someone they don’t trust,” she said.

Granlund was one of the speakers of a forum hosted by the Cebu Business Club (CBC) last Wednesday at the Marco Polo Plaza Cebu.

She encouraged the industry to take advantage of technology and to be cautious when integrating new software into their services.

“You have to make sure the systems in place will increase efficiency for renters and buyers, as well as for agents, brokers, and property managers,” she said.

Accenture, in its study released on September 2016, revealed that the impact of AI technologies on business is projected to boost labor productivity by up to 40 percent by changing the way work is done and reinforcing the role of people to drive growth in business.

In an earlier interview, JP Palpallatoc, Accenture managing director for technology, said they see AI adoption in industries as not replacing humans in their jobs but freeing people from basic and repetitive tasks and motivating them to upgrade theirs skills or move up in the labor value chain.

“The worst thing we could do is to ignore this disruption. This will happen whether we like it or not and we don’t have a choice, we need to adopt,” said Granlund, adding that services that inject emotional intelligence, relationship building and personalized services will get humans ahead of the game.

Filipino Homes vice president Chris Malazarte, in a separate forum last week, said brochures and giving out flyers in malls no longer applies to them, especially to the tech-savvy real estate sales agents and the millennial market.

Filipino Homes has a network of over 13,000 licensed real estate professionals all over the country.

“Giving flyers is already a thing of the past. The market is now online. They are now glued to their mobile screens,” said Malazarte, adding that their team has been closing billions worth of real estate projects every month on Facebook.

He explained maximizing social media allows a sales agent to reach fellow Filipinos working abroad and to those potential foreign buyers who wish to retire in the Philippines.

Overseas Filipino workers (OFW) remain the top buyers of condominium and house-and-lot projects in Cebu.

With the country sending out around 4,500 OFWs daily, potential demand for real estate projects could go up, he said.

“Ten percent of OFWs are buying real estate,” said Malazarte, adding that this is why Filipino Homes has been aggressive in going out of the country to sell Cebu.

United States, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, United Arab of Emirates, Canada, Japan, Australia, Qatar, Italy and United Kingdom are the top foreign countries which have a large concentration of OFWs.

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