For the evolution of how we are using data in business, time is flying.
James Chung, 2017 HIVE dean and president of Reach Advisors, says, “In the last six months, we made more advancement in understanding data than in our 16 years of business.”
That could also be the trend that started five years ago, named big data, now affecting the housing industry. Big data is defined by Google as extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions.
During the five years that big data has been identified as a trend, the amount of data at our fingertips has grown exponentially. Plus, Chung points out that it’s no longer just big data—we now can combine reams of data with more access to processing power, statistical modeling, greater storage, and cheaper storage. All of this equates to a new era of data science.
Chung says organizations are changing based on the data they capture and how they can reinvent themselves. He cites as an example the case study of GE transitioning from manufacturing to data analytics because it had a better business proposition dealing with data.
Nationwide, Chung says that markets are more uncertain with what is happening macroeconomically. But there is a distinct advantage to having data. It changes uncertainty into managed risk to be able to assess risk, score risk, price risk, and make fundamentally better decisions than before.
Chung also says even though housing is an industry of big players and not of incumbents, in this new age of data, there is an opportunity for new entrants. Those that are managing data well will perform better than competitors.
Plus, as data is collected, there are new ways to store it, process it, and analyze it on the construction side, sales side, and demand side. New tools are revolutionizing how data can be managed, and they are making it inexpensive. IBM Watson is available for free and offers hundreds of API solutions and other products to “help businesses work faster and work smarter.” Amazon Web Services is another tool that offers dozens of services for data analytics and data storage, and it allows customers to rent super computers for seconds or minutes at a time.
Chung says these new tools are also working much faster and more efficiently to find relationships and patterns that human analysts would never have been able to see before. “These could be critical to whether they are going to succeed or not succeed,” he says. “Power and availability is immense now.”
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This story appears as it originally did on our sister site, www.hiveforhousing.com.
