How You Can Use AI In Your Property Business

How You Can Use AI in Your Property Business

01.06.2023 By: John Penquet

In my early days of investing, I was frustrated by the lack of information about demand for property.

Most investors were relying solely on sentiment (mainly from agents) or using land registry sold prices. The absence of demand data led me to begin collecting my own data, which grew into a full UK dataset of retail prices, updated monthly at first, and then moving to daily.

Dozens of people learned that I had created this data model and began asking to use it to help them too. As word got out, I decided to create a platform to deliver this data, and also automate the search for potential properties matching common strategies. This all led to the launch of Ultimate Property Dashboard (UPD) in 2022.

And then, later in 2022 I worked to create AI driven lead generation within this software. The software would use AI to learn how to identify properties that matched common strategies such as planning gain, buy refurbish refinance, HMOs and even SA and Multi Unit Blocks.

But isn’t this just a passing phase?

Categorically no! I use software and data with AI to automate searches for property. The AI can learn if property listings match common investment strategies as I mentioned earlier. By doing this, I save 100s of hours of searching a year and pretty much have a fully automated lead generation process. Anyone can do this but I remain shocked that so many people still do this manually.

Image showing AI identified leads from Rightmove, Zoopla and On The Market using Ultimate Property Dashboard.

This is the future for our industry. Unlike other industries, property has been slow to react to the revolution in automation and relationship datasets. The old ways are no longer working for many investors, causally searching portals like Rightmove and Zoopla, or sending out letters to HMO landlords. The world has moved on and so has the opportunity to generate leads

Why should I change what I’m doing?

Nobody is suggesting you need to completely change your strategy or ways of working. What all of us need to do is adapt to the new normal and the biggest advantage step you can take is improving the efficiency of due diligence and lead generation.

It is important to realise that the volume of information an investor needs to process has grown massively over the past few years, as has the need to be faster and more efficient. We saw this in the pandemic and the aftermath, when people were complaining on missing out on property deals. I didn’t miss any, as I used AI to notify me of potential leads to check.

A typical specialised AI learning target list from Ultimate Property Dashboard

Isn’t AI and Data wrong sometimes?

The challenge for the modern investor is one familiar to people who understand technology. To steal an American phrase, Garbage in, Garbage out (GIGO). The astonishing thing is that, in 2023, most of our industry still uses datasets and information that we were using 20 years ago.

You can have the best AI and software in the world, but if you feed it data and information that is irrelevant or out of date, the results will be poor. This is why I worked for several years to gather and measure the right data and information. I feed the AI and software data which is unique, up to date and relevant. Sold prices are useless, so I use new forms of data which I created and maintain for our industry to use.

This is the greatest opportunity and the biggest risk to investors over the coming years. There are many software solutions emerging like my own, but they are only as good as the data and information they gather or access.

Chart shows how new datasets and feeds can inform the trends in sold prices

Will this change benefit me and others like me now, or should I wait?

From a small handful of interested landlords, I now work with and provide data and AI technology to hundreds of them, and the demand isn’t slowing down. It was inevitable that this would happen given the importance of efficiency and good due diligence in the modern business world – our industry is now following other industries in evolving.

In the short term, there is the huge saving of time, especially when buying or selling property.

The market is now starting to react and shift much more quickly to irregularities in pricing and demand. This frenzied shifty, most driven by changes in lifestyle and supply imbalance is critical to understand. We already have this capability and can forecast price inflation or deflation with amazing accuracy using the data and AI at our disposal. This is very likely to influence investing in future and possibly make finance and legislation more localised and geared toward demand and potential. This is a very exciting possibility, where you can get better terms and incentives for providing property in areas of higher need and demand. This is good for us all: landlords, tenants and society in general.

The final and most important question of all is are your ready and taking action in your business. If not, you need to start learning…!

The good news is that what I’ve described is easy to work with. Like most new technology, the earlier adopters make the largest and quickest gains, so make your life easier and more certain in these uncertain times by plugging data and software AI into your business process. You can start by watching me using AI live in a video by following this link:

https://bit.ly/44sHOEP

Remember, successful property investment requires facts rather than opinions. Make sure you have what you need.

John Penquet

Market Data Expert

Here we outline how you canadd the senders email address to your safe sender list or ‘whitelist’for the most common email providers.

Outlook Users

Open the email from the sender you would like to add to the safelist. Click on the "Junk" link next to the delete button in the top left corner. Click on “Never Block Sender" in the drop-down options below the ‘Junk’ icon. Their email message will be automatically added to your Outlook safe senders list.

Outlook (Web Version) Users

Once logged in, click on the cog in the top right-hand side of your inbox. Click on “Safe Senders” under the “Mail” tab. Open the email from the sender you would like to add to the safelist. Enter the email address of the sender and click the plus sign. Your sender will be automatically added to your Outlook safe senders list.

Apple Mail

Open the email from the sender you would like to add to the safelist. Click on the sender’s email address at the top of the email. A list of options will appear on a drop down. Click on “Add to Address Book” Your sender will be automatically added to your Apple Mail safe senders list.

Gmail® Users

Open the email from the sender you would like to add to the safelist. Click on the arrow next to an email icon on the far right. Select “Add To Contacts”. You will see the text “Added *Email Address* to contacts.” Appear at the top of the screen, meaning your new contact has been added to your Gmail Safe senders list.

Via an iPhone/iPad

Open the email from the sender you would like to add to the safelist. Tap the sender's name in the “From” line. On the next screen, tap “Create New Contact”. Add the details of the email sender (the email will be populated otherwise you will need to add the sender’s other details, name, address etc) Tap “Done”.

Via an Android Phone

Tap to open the email from the sender you would like to add to the safelist. Tap the icon next to the email address on the left-hand side. Tap “Create contact”. Add the details of the email sender (the email will be populated otherwise you will need to add the sender’s other details, name, address etc). Tap “save”.