Ray White Group deploys business intelligence from Tableau Software

Real estate franchise the Ray White Group has deployed business intelligence software to help drive its geographical expansion strategy.

As a franchise group, Ray White makes money by taking a commission on sales from its members - the parent group is more profitable when its children are more profitable. Around seven years ago, the company identified a need to measure its market share and be able to analyse that at a suburb level.

Nathan Krisanski, Senior Analyst at Ray White, said, “We did have a solution that was built before I came along [four years ago], and that was a custom-built map/pie chart view.”

But the company decided that application wasn’t meeting its future needs.

“It was hosted externally, so we didn’t have any control over the application itself. We had to format our results in a certain way and upload it to their system, and they’d process it and put it into the backend, and we’d see the information come back out. It was quite time-consuming in the sense of being able to update things and be able to enforce change as well. We ran into brick walls trying to get new features added,” Krisanski said.

Ray White implemented a solution from Tableau Software to build a customised presentation layer called documentbuilder. The software breaks down multidimensional data into visualisations, to help access geographical sales and performance information.

The solution was initially intended to replace the company’s existing pie chart tool.

“From there, it’s grown into being our one-stop shop for information - any of our analytics reports, state-based reports, salesperson performance, all that kind of stuff. Now we’ve also built another custom engine which is for our agents in creating sales reports for their clients - the mum and dad who are going to buy a house in Sydney or wherever,” said Krisanski.

Through a web-based portal connected to Tableau Server, Ray White allows sales representatives to create their own market reports for specific geographies, drilling from the national level down to individual suburbs. These reports include visual dashboards, pie charts and maps, to help close deals and gain insights into market performance.

The new system has helped fuel the company’s recent growth, Krisanski said. It has also helped with the absorption of real estate agents into the Ray White brand.

“A big push we have internally is for the recruitment of new businesses. Being able to represent ourselves as knowing about the market, giving the tools back to their agents, so if they join Ray White their agents get access to all these tools and all this data that we have, has made the recruitment process a lot easier, a lot better,” Krisanski said.

“One of the key parts of our process is evaluating [franchise applicants] when they come through. A lot of the guys are surprised to know that before they join us, we know more about them than they do sometimes. That’s certainly given us a great deal of power and knowledge in the industry,” he said.