PPW founder, Mitula chairman and serial investor, Simon Baker, kicked off his Best Practice Masterclass – Driving Superior Performance – in Bangkok to a full room of delegates including representatives from Shwe Property, Core Logic and Batdongsan.
Over 40 executives from across the globe gathered as Baker gave insightful tips around how to structure a portal business, generate and drive leads and how to tackle marketing and relationship-building.
One of the key points of the session was an emphasis for property portals to developing a strong vision and strategy to be able to build a successful business, which Baker says is paramount to operating a winning portal.
“You can have the best idea in the world but if you can’t structure it in order to execute, there is no idea,” he said. “It’s important to know what you want to become, and to do that you need to have absolute clarity,” he said. Delegates agreed with Baker that the UK-based fixed-fee home selling model Purplebricks had absolutely nailed their strategy and that this has led to their expansion into the US.
As the Masterclass title suggests, the audience was given strategic advice on how to best prepare their portal for high performance with the day’s session pinpointing five main areas: Targeting agents, developers and private sellers; Managing and presenting listings; Driving traffic; Creating engagement and generating leads, and; Monetisation.
Key themes
It wasn’t long before conference delegates were unpacking the theme of data in reference to property portals and how an organisation can best leverage the data they have to be able to drive sales.
Baker outlined the importance of building databases and the various measures adopted to be able to collect data as a tool to forecast what a buyer actually wants.
“If you have data you can go from services to a targeted marketing business,” Baker asserted. “Once you collect the data you can target the candidate.”
We already see this occur now with movie streaming service Netflix and Baker conceded that it was only a matter of time before the online property industry moves in a similar direction; by using data to predictive match buyers and sellers in order to complete a swift transaction; a move that could potentially cut out portals altogether leaving just a middleman who introduces the two.
“It will go in the inevitable direction of prediction; the more data we have the more we can predict,” he forecast.”
The official PPW Conference in Bangkok kicks off tomorrow. Check out the agenda and grab your ticket now.
