On the latest episode of The Voice of the Agent podcast, we learned what happens when estate agency marketing meets serious data.
Recorded live at the Voice of the Agent Conference at the rather awe-inducing Bletchley Park, this episode features a conversation between Ben Nicholas, Head of Real Estate & Property at Experian, and Unchained founder Simon Leadbetter.
If you missed it, here are five lessons that really landed, and why they matter far beyond January.
Lesson 1: Estate agents know houses. Not people.
As agents, we’re brilliant at property data. Square footage, bedroom counts, sold prices, rental yields, EPC ratings...
But as Ben put it so neatly, that’s like standing outside a house and peering through the window.
You might be able to value it, but you’ve got no idea who’s inside.
Who lives there?
What stage of life are they in?
What do they care about?
How do they like to be communicated with?
Most property marketing stops at the bricks; better marketing starts with the humans.
That’s the gap tools like Experian Mosaic fill, and it’s a gap most agents don’t even realise they’re ignoring.
Lesson 2: Data doesn’t kill creativity. It sharpens it.
There’s a fear in our industry that data-led marketing means dull, corporate, beige output.
The opposite is true.
When you actually understand your audience - their values, beliefs, habits, preferences - your creativity gets more interesting, not less.
Ben discussed with Simon an example of an agency discovering, through data, that their customers had a high propensity for charitable giving. That insight led to a major charity campaign… and tens of thousands raised.
That’s not cold marketing, it’s more human marketing.
Lesson 3: Other industries are miles ahead. Property is still guessing.
One of the most uncomfortable moments in the session was this:
Every major industry Ben has worked in - financial services, automotive, retail - uses postcode-level insight as standard.
Property… largely doesn’t.
We literally know where people live, and yet we mostly rely on gut feel, anecdote, and “what we’ve always done”.
The result?
It’s the difference between firing in the dark and using laser-guided vision.
Lesson 4: Channel preference actually matters (a lot)
One of Ben’s favourite Mosaic party tricks was running his own postcode.
Within minutes, Mosaic had predicted:
No cold calls, please. Email? Fine.
How many agency marketing plans genuinely factor that in?
We talk endlessly about “multi-channel”, but rarely about the preferred channel.
Lesson 5: AI becomes powerful when it stops being generic
This is where things got properly exciting.
AI on its own is clever, but vague. Ask it about “home sellers in Bristol” and you’ll get a reasonable, broad-brush answer.
Feed it your actual customer data - postcode-level insight about the people who already use you - and something changes.
Suddenly, AI isn’t guessing.
It’s working from truth.
Marketing plans become faster to build, sharper in focus, and grounded in reality rather than assumptions. What used to take days can happen in minutes - and be better for it.
You can listen to The Voice of the Agent podcast on Spotify