The Hidden Costs of Manual Data Entry
Every listing carries dozens of data points, oftentimes hundreds. The time and effort it takes to manually enter the information is not only time-consuming, but it also creates inefficiencies across your brokerage that aren’t always visible. We’re drilling down into the specifics to take a closer look at the hidden costs of manual data entry.
One listing, multiple platforms
Most brokerages publish listings to more than just the MLS. Today’s real estate ecosystem spans back-office systems, third-party portals, and brokerage websites, most of which require the listing to be manually entered again. One listing can easily touch three or four separate platforms, and when you multiply that across every agent and every listing, the hours lost add up quickly.
Pre-market Listings
As more and more websites start to publish listings before they hit the MLS, agents now have another layer of data entry to contend with. They have to enter everything, including all the photos and video, in the pre-market portal and then enter it all over again once the home goes live on the MLS. The brokerages that use systems to handle it now will have a significant operational advantage over those who don’t.
To see how Ocusell supports pre-market listings and prevents the need for re-entering data, head to our explanation here.
Risk of Errors Increases
The first time an agent enters a property’s details on the MLS, the risk of error is relatively low. But that risk compounds every time that data is entered again. Whether it’s a listing admin re-keying data from internal documents or an agent publishing to multiple MLSs, every additional entry is a new opportunity for errors. Besides the time wasted on correcting the errors, the potential costs from liability can be enormous.
Opportunity Cost
Our early research showed it typically takes a minimum of 45 minutes for someone to create and publish a listing, oftentimes longer when they have to correct errors or track down more information about the property. When you multiply 45 minutes for each listing published in a week at a brokerage, it quickly adds up to hours of time wasted on manual entry. That’s time your agents aren’t spending with clients, prospecting, or closing deals. Calculate how much time your brokerage could save on our website.
Employee Fatigue
Entering data is one of the most tedious tasks in today’s business world and can quickly take a toll on staff morale and enthusiasm for the job, leading to higher staff turnover. The cost of staff turnover far outweighs the cost of incorporating a system that can streamline data entry.
Just one example our client shared with us was how much faster it was to use Ocusell on a day when five different properties had price reductions. Prior to Ocusell they would have had to make the price changes ten different times since all five were listed in two MLSs. With Ocusell, they only had to update each listing once and the changes were published simultaneously to both MLSs.
Knowledge Gaps
The employees responsible for manually entering data are often the only ones within an organization who know all the requirements and ins and outs of each platform. When one or more of these employees isn’t available, it slows down the time it takes to finalize a listing and get it live. Many brokerages have to train their staff on all the different MLS platforms where they publish listings which is time-consuming, and when staff turnover happens, brokerages have to train someone new on every platform from scratch.
Manual data entry isn’t just time-consuming, it’s costing your brokerage. Ocusell is designed to speed up time-to-list by auto-populating approximately 60% of the listing data fields, catching listing violations before publishing, and publishing to multiple MLSs from a single add/edit form.