Domain Group powers growth with data-driven partnerships and self-service analytics

Domain Group is Australia’s leading real estate platform for residential, commercial and rural property sales and rentals. Reaching out to 5.9 million property seekers each month via tailored campaigns across various platforms, Domain Group’s Chief Data Officer Pooyan Asgari identified a need for an analytics tool to manage the large pool of data, and yield live actionable insights for strategic business decisions.

With Tableau, Domain Group generated substantial business value for their partners and achieved profitable growth in the last five years, setting a precedent for a promising future powered by data analytics.

Domain Group’s rapid expansion in the past 5 years amassed a large and rich data pool of more than 20 terabytes of information stored in an in-house data warehouse.

Until 2015, data analytics was handled by a specialist team in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) department. The majority of employees had restricted access to company data and were unable to access actionable insights in a timely manner.

The implementation of Tableau has turned this model on its head. Following a comprehensive training program for almost all of Domain Group’s 700 employees, the company now has 300 active users of the platform across its sales, product, marketing and strategy teams. More business users are now equipped with the skills and mechanism to explore and interrogate data independently, leading to a significant increase in data-driven decision making.

“The real estate market is one of the most active and dynamic sectors in Australia. Taking a traditional approach to data would have put Domain Group at a commercial disadvantage,” Pooyan said.

“The Tableau platform has given us the ability to access data that’s critical for responsive insight-led decision making.”

Domain Group’s sales department plays a vital role in building relationships with advertisers from the real estate industry nationwide.

Prior to the implementation of Tableau, Domain’s 200 sales representatives were reliant on the marketing department to provide them with property market insights. Updates were provided monthly or quarterly. Given the dynamic nature of the property market, there was an ongoing information lag as a result. Sales representatives had no facility to request customized reports. On occasion, those created by the marketing team were too generic to be of significant use to clients.

The implementation of the Tableau platform gave sales representatives the ability to generate their own real-time insights to share with the 13,000 real estate agents who advertise on the site. Tableau has empowered Domain’s sales representatives to act as trusted advisors and build deeper relationships with their clients.

“We are now able to share these insights with our agency partners to help them hone their marketing campaigns and get better results for their clients – the millions of Australians who rely on the Domain platform to buy, sell and rent properties,” Pooyan said.

“Being able to access data live has transformed the way we interact with these vitally important partners.”

Domain’s strategy department charts the Group’s course in 2019 and beyond. This is no simple remit, given Australia’s rapidly evolving digital landscape and the intensified competition which comes with digital disruption.

As the organization’s key source of truth, Domain’s mammoth data warehouse contains key insights to profitable expansion and business improvement. Now equipped with Tableau, the strategy team can independently extract the actionable insights they need to make critical strategic decisions, without going through the data analytics department.

A growing culture of self-service analytics helps Domain achieve new milestones in an increasingly competitive property environment.

“Domain Group has enjoyed extraordinary growth over the past five years by enhancing the profitability of existing platforms and identifying new opportunities to add value,” shared Pooyan.

“Becoming a data-driven business played a key part in this success. Tableau empowered our team to incorporate data analytics into the decision-making process.”