Who owns your real estate data?

I recently had an interesting meeting with a prominent agency where we reviewed a contract from a potential service provider. I was left a little rattled (and the client even more), so I thought I'd share this info with you.

Ever cared to look into the fine print of your service providers terms & conditions? You'll be surprised that some claim ownership of data YOU entered into the system.  This includes seller, buyer, listing and sales data. Some of these contracts often contain pages and pages of legal jargon and, in the case we’ve looked at, stipulated that the service provider can use the data entered by the agency as they wish.

Do you realize that your data (sellers, buyer,tenant info) is one of the most valuable pieces of information your business thrives on and should be protected at all cost? Protection your clients personal data is also critical for building long term relationships, required by the new consumer protection laws in South Africa, and ... running an ethical real estate business!

Entegral’s terms & conditions state that all data entered by our clients, are the property of our client. We will not under any circumstance sell or provide personal data to any company. Entegral is an independent company and you can therefore be assured that your data is in safe hands.

Just something you need to check up on and ponder if you have a growing real estate organisation / agency!

Popular posts from this blog

Easily link Base with external CRM systems

Image
What is the Base Zapier integration? The Entegral Base system was recently improved with a native Zapier app integration . This allows estate agents to exchange data and create automated workflows with over 2000+ popular apps, including all the leading CRM specific apps.  Why even link a CRM system? Although Base has contact management, contact categories, automatic lead import, and other great CRM features , users sometimes require very specific CRM functions that we don't (yet) cater to. With our Zapier integration , we allow agents to link any popular app with Base. Once linked with your app, you can for instance automatically synchronise your contacts from Base to the external app or vice versa.  The added benefit is that you can create automated workflows and link more apps (e.g. insert contact details into a Mailchimp drip email campaign  and ZOHO CRM at the same time). This makes the Zapier fee irreverent compared to the derived benefits.  Automated portal lead import from
Read more

Property24 acquires Private Property, what do estate agents think?

Image
Property24.com, South Africa’s largest property portal owned by Naspers, has bought rival Private Property . The deal is likely to come under the close scrutiny of competition authorities as it involves the two biggest property portals in the country. Due to the impact of such an acquisition on the industry, Entegral was interested to find out what the perceived advantages and disadvantages of such a deal would be, both through the eyes of the consumer and the estate agent.   Here are the results from around 250 responses received on a survey done over a 2 day period , mostly from agents and agency owners. While the survey presents a small portion of the market (a ccording to the EAAB's latest annual report there are 19,424 registered agents and agency owners, excluding intern estate agents, in South Africa) , f eedback has been received from well-respected agency owners and agents, and we believe this gives a good indication of the current view of agents. The fear from estate
Read more

US trends show more buyers come from internet, less from print

Image
Where home buyers found the home they purchased- 2001 vs. 2008   Have a look at the very interesting figures published for USA home buyers on: http://rismedia.com/2009-03-29/buyers-becoming-more-successful-finding-homes-through-internet/   The NAR statistics show that 7 years on from 2001, 32% of home buyers found their home through the internet. What’s even more interesting is that print newspaper hardly makes an impact, a mere 3% of buyers found their home through print.  
Read more