Adopting the latest technology and continuous innovation are the keys to transforming the real estate businesses. The real estate industry is being shaped by shifting market technologies, such as beacons technology, and the buyers’ behavior. Over the last year, one of the largest growing trends in real estate has been the shift from the physical touchpoints to a more targeted online experience.

In this blog, we will talk about how beacons technology is helping realtors grow their business and why the industry is experiencing a massive adoption of the technology. But before we dive into that, let’s first take a look at the technologies that attempted to connect the physical world of real estate to online but have experienced limited success.

Technologies that Attempted to Connect Offline to Online in Real Estate

1. QR Codes

QR Code was an attempt to connect offline platform to online, but unfortunately, it did not deliver what the realtors hoped for. The reasons for the failure of QR codes for real estate -

1. Although mobile devices incorporated a preloaded version of QR code reader in their system (Apple Passbook), that was neither widely known nor used. Numbers say that only 24% of US mobile users used Passbook in the initial 6 months, i.e., when it created the maximum hype.

2. Apple’s initiative of a preloaded QR scanner - Passbook works only for apps it is optimized for. That is - around a dozen apps in the US, that includes Starbucks, Living Social, Office Depot, Sephora and more. In the UK app store, that shrinks to mere 5 apps - iHotel, United Airlines, Lufthansa, American Airlines and Starbucks.

2. Social media to drive offline traffic

Real estate agents use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to showcase themselves, educate prospects about the property or contact the team, with the hope of generating business leads, but the output from social media is almost negligible. 

3. Near Field Communication (NFC)

Near Field Communication (NFC) is considered to be another powerful location technology. But it had its own set of challenges and limitations that accounted for the decline in adoption in the real estate. The primary reasons of the downfall of NFC are the following:

1. NFC requires applications to be in very close proximity ­which is not feasible for the real estate’s important use-case of leveraging beacons on billboards, yard signs etc.
2. NFC requires inputs from the users. The user has to pull out their phone and “tap” it onto an NFC reader. As one would expect, any intervention required from a prospect drastically cuts down conversion.

How can beacons technology help realtors where other technologies have failed?

When it comes to beacons technology, the results are vastly superior compared to its competitor technologies. After Retail, which dominates the beacon space, real estate and logistics make up for over 20% of the technology adoption.

Following are a few statistics that help explain the adoption in the real estate sector -

1. 570 million Android and Apple devices globally have access to Bluetooth. The average click-through rate (CTR) of beacon proximity campaign is 8% and with better targeting, the average goes up to 12%, which is 20 times the CTR of online ads and Facebook campaigns.

2. Mobile search is now the primary way of searching Real Estate property - 51% of the buyers find properties online. With a large number of buyers surfing the internet for property, it makes an appropriate time to connect physical touchpoints with contextual online experience. The best part about contextual beacon notifications is that it needs no inputs from the buyer.

3. Yard signs and open house boards, have not lost its charm in real estate either. Beacons deployed on either of them help attract buyers by sending contextual notifications when they pass by.

4. Eddystone beacon protocol is Google’s proximity solution that helps businesses deliver notifications on mobile, without the need for an app.

5. Excellent ROI - Beacons cost less than twenty dollars and can be powered by batteries for a few years. The low cost coupled with minimal effort needed to install the beacons makes it an out-of-the-box and cost-effective solution to deploy and derive great ROI.

6. Unlike NFC and QR codes, beacons have the ability to push messages to prospects without buyers’ intervention - this overcomes a “major hurdle” for realtors who want to engage with buyers in a more personalized manner — because it makes that engagement completely effortless for them.

According to the latest market intelligence report by BIS Research, the global beacons technology market is expected to $56.55 Billion by 2026. The market has developed substantially in the last few years owing to the increase in the IoT spending, rise in the demand of beacons for providing location-based marketing, and development of smart cities across the globe. The futuristic beacons technology is already here, and it is here to stay.

About the author

Monika Adarsh, manages the marketing initiatives at Beaconstac, a company offering a marketing and analytics software platform utilizing beacons technology.