Outgoing Steinert further boosts Stockland data
Mark Steinert, whose investment in technology gave Stockland a $10 million boost in sales in the last six months, is increasing the developer’s investment in data capability even as he prepares to walk out the door.
The company, which last week said it had rolled out new technology in the first half that converted 83 per cent of sales leads to transactions and brought in the extra residential revenue, has invested $2.5 million to take a minority stake in data analytics and strategy company smrtr.
The customer segmentation and demographic analysis of smrtr – previously known as Greater Data – was used in Stockland’s residential platform to refine sales leads, in the digital platform offered to its smaller retail tenants, as well as by its leasing team to identify likely tenants and it made sense to safeguard those capabilities with the investment, Stockland’s chief executive and managing director Mr Steinert said.
“We do believe that data is the new oil and we think our partnership and requirements around data are only going to grow,” he told The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday.
“If we plan to use partners like that more and more, we need to think about security of supply chain for us.”
It also made sense for Stockland’s shareholders to benefit from the value growth the company helped create, he said. At $2.5 million, it is the largest investment the company has made to date in a number of start-ups including Bricklet, the fractional ownership platform in which it and Mirvac both invested in 2019.
Despite Australia’s property industry widely seen as lagging its global counterparts in the adoption of technology, there is a growing use of data collection and analysis. In NSW, Building Commissioner David Chandler has partnered with Equifax to develop a tool that will assess the riskiness of developers, builders and certifiers based on records of building failures, finances, complaints, insurance claims and other data.
smrtr says it tracks data of 16 million Australians, allowing it to link 50-billion transactions.
“We combine all of these to come up with a unique way of viewing the consumer,” chief executive Georgie Brooke told The Australian Financial Review.
The company, founded 11 years ago, will use funds from the capital round that brought Stockland on as a shareholder to develop two new real estate products, a dashboard for real estate agencies to assess and improve their performance and another one to help small developers get access to information such as site availability, land releases and population projections.
The company doesn’t solely focus on real estate, but uses data to assess behaviour that spreads across different sectors and link them.
“For every person who moves home, 75 per cent of those are owner occupiers and they are spending $15,000 in incremental retail sales they weren’t expecting to within a month of moving in,” Mr Brooke told the Financial Review.
“Twenty five per cent of people that move house also buy a new car. That insight tells you the opportunities we have to give retail customers insight into people’s relocation.”
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