Almost all agencies assess a database of new-build properties by looking at the monthly payment. Fifteen euros, twenty-nine, forty… The figure may seem high or low depending on how your month has gone, and that’s where the analysis ends.
The figure missing from that calculation is how much the alternative costs you – namely, continuing to update things manually. You pay that cost every month, and it doesn’t appear on any invoice because it’s hidden within your payslip.
How much does it cost you to update the new build manually every month?
Someone in your office opens the emails from the property developers, logs into Dropbox, checks which properties have gone up in price, how many units are left and which promotions have ended, and enters this information into the CRM. That person is on the payroll. The hours they spend keeping the catalogue up to date represent money that leaves the agency every month.
To put a figure on it, you only need one variable: the hourly cost of the person doing the work. An administrative assistant earns between 17,500 and 19,500 euros gross per year, according to the collective agreement for offices and practices. If you add the employer’s Social Security contribution – around 31.65 per cent – to a gross salary of 18,000 euros, the cost to your agency rises to around 23,700 euros a year. Spread over a working year of 1,780 hours, each hour worked by that person costs you 13.31 euros.
With that figure, the rest is simply a matter of arithmetic.
| Hours per day spent updating manually | Hours per year | Annual cost for your agency |
|---|---|---|
| 1 hour | 220 | €2.929 |
| 2 hours | 440 | €5,858 |
| 2.5 hours | 550 | € 7,322 |
| 4 hours | 880 | €11.715 |
If you think the last row is an exaggeration, just think about what it involves to manage fifty listings a day during a week of new releases. Downloading product files, renaming photos, correcting prices, checking which variants are still available, and uploading it all again. Even four hours might not seem like much.
How much does it cost to receive automatic updates for new builds?
Given these figures, the cost of receiving the same information, already structured and sent to your CRM via an XML feed, works out as follows when using REDSP as a new-build management system for estate agents.
| Concept | First year | From the second |
|---|---|---|
| REDSP Zone 1, annual payment | €348 | €348 |
| Registration fee, one-off payment | €125 | €0 |
| Total | €473 | €348 |
If you’re targeting a more specific area, the starting price drops to 15 euros a month in Zone 3. In all cases, the XML feed, the microsite and the landing pages are included in the base price, with no separate add-ons.
The formula for calculating ROI using your agency’s numbers
That’s two operations and four pieces of data that you already have.
- Cost of doing it by hand = hours per day × 220 working days × hourly cost of the person doing it
- Annual saving = cost of doing it by hand − annual cost of the tool
- ROI = (annual savings ÷ annual cost of the tool) × 100
To work out the hourly rate, divide your gross annual salary multiplied by 1.32 by the number of hours in the working year. If you are the one updating the figures rather than an employee, use the amount you pay yourself – or, better still, the amount you would charge if you spent those hours on sales.
Example of an ROI calculation at a typical agency
Let’s consider the situation of a estate agency on the Costa Blanca, with four sales agents and one administrative assistant. It sells to overseas buyers and maintains around sixty listings of new-build properties published on its website and property portals. The administrative staff spend two and a half hours a day keeping this catalogue up to date, which is the conservative estimate given in the table above.
| Concept | Import |
|---|---|
| Cost of manual updating (550 hours × €13.31) | €7,322 per year |
| Cost of REDSP in the first year | 473 €/año |
| Savings in the first year | 6.849 € |
| ROI el primer año | 1.448 % |
| ROI from the second year onwards | 2.004 % |
To put it another way, for every euro invested, the agency recoups just over fourteen in the first year and twenty from the second year onwards. The break-even point is reached after 36 hours of administrative work have been saved, a figure the agency achieves before the end of the first month.
Those 550 hours don’t just disappear from the calendar. They’re returned to the admin team, who can use them to handle incoming calls and follow up with customers who are already waiting for a reply.
How much is the commission you don’t lose because of out-of-date information worth?
The above calculation only measures time, but it fails to take into account the most costly issue, the transaction that fails because the data was not up to date.
I’m sure the following scenario sounds familiar. A Dutch client flies down to the coast, visits three developments and decides on one. You ring the developer to book it and they tell you that that type of property sold out ten days ago, or that the price has gone up by 20,000 euros. The client not only misses out on that house, but also loses confidence in your knowledge of what you’re selling.
Put a figure on that call. A new-build property on the coast costing 300,000 euros, with the minimum commission of 3 per cent that REDSP charges the developers it lists, amounts to 9,000 euros in commission. A single operation saved each year is equivalent to twenty-six times the annual cost of the tool.
It doesn’t have to happen every month. If you can prevent just one such incident every two years, the investment will have more than paid for itself.
What the database provides that the ROI calculation does not capture
There are two pieces that don’t fit into the formula because they depend on how you use them, although they do change the equation quite a bit.
Direct contact with the developer and commission-based screening
Each reference is accompanied by the name of the developer, the commission they pay, their contact details and a link to their Dropbox or Drive containing further documentation.
That allows you to do two things. Negotiate the terms of each deal directly, without an intermediary involved, and filter the portfolio by commission before spending an afternoon preparing a proposal, ruling out from the outset anything that isn’t worth your while to present.
The commission filter seems like a minor detail until you work out how many hours you’ve spent promoting a product that paid 1.5 per cent.
Network of agents to refer business outside your area
Within the platform, you’ll find ANET, a referral network amongst REDSP agencies designed to refer clients who are outside your area or language group, and to share the commission. You can think of it as an open channel for networking and referrals rather than a source of income that you can factor into your budget.
Calculate the ROI of your new-build property database before making a decision
Get hold of the payslip of the person who updates the catalogue at your branch, time how long it takes them over the course of a week, and apply the formula. It doesn’t matter what result you get; what matters is that you stop comparing a monthly payment against zero and start comparing it against what you’re already paying.
Si quieres ver qué incluye cada zona y qué cuota te corresponde según dónde trabajes, lo tienes desglosado en la página de precios. Y si estás valorando con otras herramientas, te interesa más la comparativa con Metainmo que hicimos donde entramos en cobertura, estructura del feed y costes ocultos.
