What’s the biggest challenge for a real estate professional in California? Your mileage may vary, but we’d make an educated guess that plenty of agents are frustrated by the lack of inventory hitting an already competitive market. Yet, as JohnHart Real Estate’s CEO and founder Harout Keuroghlian always says, “When the inventory isn’t there, you make your own.” And that’s the perfect introduction for one of our firm’s no-longer-so-secret weapons: Inventory Identifier. Inventory Identifier uses cutting-edge predictive AI to estimate when homes in Los Angeles are most likely to hit the market again. And by giving JohnHart’s agents this “heads up”, we give our professionals (and their clients) a clear advantage in a tight market.
The Problem: Dwindling Inventory
Even with the media running wild with housing inventory horror stories, we can realistically admit that California needs more homes. The state’s housing agency conservatively estimates that California requires an additional 2.5 million homes to satisfy demand (and these figures are from a 2022 report). By 2025, estimates from other agencies put that figure closer to 3.5 million. And this is after the addition of 677,000 new housing units after a 6-year period in which the Golden State’s population only surged by about 39,000 residents.
Even with developments outpacing an influx of new residents, fewer people are living under the same roofs. More families without children are moving to California, offsetting the rising trend of multi-generational living sweeping the country. Even if you agree that the media is leaning into the crisis with clickbait headlines, an inventory shortage can’t be denied. But that’s what makes a tool supported by state-of-the-art predictive AI like Inventory Identifier such a priceless asset to a real estate agent trying to get ahead in California’s cutthroat market.
How Inventory Identifier Works to Address Housing Inventory Headaches
JohnHart developed its proprietary Inventory Identifier tool as a means of predicting which contacts are most likely to sell their homes. Anticipating in early 2025 that California’s housing inventory shortage would disproportionately impact the search for homes in Los Angeles where inventory was already scarce, JohnHart Real Estate used predictive AI to add our Inventory Identifier tool into our proprietary CRM, SWARMcrm, built exclusively for JohnHart’s valued agents. We remain committed to ensuring that our agents have not just access to new inventory, but the ability to create their own inventory. It may sound ambitious, but there’s a clear, traceable method behind it.
What Inventory Identifier Uses to Flag Opportunity
Inventory Identifier uses a series of factors to narrow down the homeowners in our vast network with the highest selling potential. While we can’t give away all of our secrets, some of the factors our predictive AI uses to gauge a homeowner’s willingness to list include:
(1.) Purchase Anniversaries: Our collected data indicates how long a homeowner resides in one spot before considering a sale. By using predictive AI and assessing purchase anniversaries alongside other key factors, we can keep up on this trend and estimate a homeowner’s eagerness to list their home.
(2.) Listing Alerts – We have multiple reasons for suggesting our agents sign every single one of their clients up for Listing Alerts through our intuitive CRM, SWARMcrm. One of the biggest reasons: Inventory Identifier can actually measure engagement, providing another valuable indicator of whether a homeowner is contemplating selling their home.
(3.) Property Address – When homes in Los Angeles sell in a specific neighborhood, it influences others to list as well. It’s why we use Inventory Identifier to monitor activity, including listings, sales, and cancellations, within a 0.5-mile radius.
How Inventory Identifier Gives Agents a Client Connection Advantage
The organization of our Inventory Identifier is so convenient and intuitive that our agents lose no time in being the first to connect with these primed potential sellers. JohnHart agents simply need to log in to their SWARMcrm accounts each morning, where they’ll find the most likely potential sellers flagged by Inventory Identifier presented on the CRM’s dashboard. By using predictive AI and our own collected data, we’re able to provide our agents with daily updates to keep their efforts fresh.
To ensure that our agents never miss one of these opportunities, we allow them to be notified, based on their personal preferences, through:
(1.) Email Alerts
(2.) SWARMcrm Prompts
(3.) SWARMcrm Dashboard
There’s no excuse to miss out on these housing inventory-generating opportunities.
What Data Does an Agent Need to Use Inventory Identifier?
The agents who regularly update and complete their contacts in SWARMcrm will enjoy the most benefit from JohnHart’s exclusive Inventory Identifier tool. Predictive AI needs you to feed it, and while our support staff does most of the heavy lifting behind the scenes, it is still up to you as the agent to ensure the following required information is updated for each contact in your network to use Inventory Identifier to its full potential:
(1.) Email Address
(2.) Physical Property Address
(3.) Purchase Anniversary
Obviously, the more contacts you add to your network, the more daily results you’ll receive through Inventory Identifier. It also helps a great deal to set your contacts up for automatic Listing Alerts. This allows us to measure a contact’s engagement, another key factor in rising interest to list a home.
Maximizing Your Inventory Identifier Advantage
It matters how an agent uses the data provided by Inventory Identifier to generate more housing inventory. It all boils down to staying in close contact with anyone flagged by Inventory Identifier. Some of the best ways to use this tool to generate listings for more homes in Los Angeles and beyond include:
(1.) Sending out Comparative Marketing Analyses (CMAs)
(2.) Connecting through email
(3.) Sending text messages
(4.) Door knocking (each time you have an active buyer, make sure the surrounding neighborhood knows all about it – this creates urgency, revealing sellers who might otherwise remain on the sidelines)
(5.) Sending out a JohnHart Listing Presentation box
(6.) Social media engagement
(7.) Send a personal letter
(8.) Reach out with a phone call
Low Housing Inventory Can Be a Problem – or an Opportunity
Seller behavior isn’t exclusive to listing homes in Los Angeles, but using predictive AI and a tailored tool like Inventory Identifier gives our agents a clear advantage in one of the country’s most competitive housing markets. Low housing inventory is a problem, but not an insurmountable one. By scrutinizing a contact’s behavior, we can determine how likely they are to list. That’s a huge deal. Especially since prospective sellers so often start browsing home values, homes in other cities, and other sales in their neighborhood before they even consider contacting an agent.
So, what if that agent intuitively picks up the phone and calls them first? Perhaps in that action lies the most powerful benefit of JohnHart’s Inventory Identifier tool. It allows our agents to predict a client’s needs before the client even fully realizes them. That’s a new level of service. And in a city where housing inventory is so limited, a tool that pushes more homes in Los Angeles into a hungry market is good for everyone.
Wondering what you could do with a tool like Inventory Identifier in your arsenal? Then consider aligning with a brokerage that puts agent development first, using strategy, time-tested fundamentals, cutting-edge technology, and a support team of experts to give our professionals an advantage. Visit JoinJohnHart.com today to find out more.
With a brand that says as much as JohnHart’s, Senior Copywriter Seth Styles never finds himself at a loss for words. Responsible for maintaining the voice of the company, he spends each day drafting marketing materials, blogs, bios, and agent resources that speak from the company’s collective mind and Hart… errr, heart.
Having spent over a decade in creative roles across a variety of industries, Seth brings with him vast experience in SEO practices, digital marketing, and all manner of professional writing with particular strength in blogging, content creation, and brand building. Gratitude, passion, and sincerity remain core tenets of his unwavering work ethic. The landscape of the industry changes daily, paralleling JohnHart’s efforts to {re}define real estate, but Seth works to maintain the company’s consistent message while offering both agents and clients a new echelon of service.
When not preserving the JohnHart essence in stirring copy, Seth puts his efforts into writing and illustrating an ongoing series entitled The Death of Romance. In addition, he adores spending quality time with his girlfriend and Romeo (his long-haired chihuahua mix), watching ‘70s and ‘80s horror movies, and reading (with a particular penchant for Victorian horror novels and authors Yukio Mishima and Bret Easton Ellis). He also occasionally records music as the vocalist and songwriter for his glam rock band, Peppermint Pumpkin.
