The True Cost of Bad Data (& Repair)

Revaluate provides a FREE AUDIT that has no cost to you, that highlights the detailed truth in your database and allows us to provide a quote for your specific database repair needs. It has a list price / value of $250, yet is FREE (for a limited time).

Tom Ferry has been awesome about sharing this with his coaches and agents. But, some details have been lost in translation, and this has caused some confusion. So, let’s clarify, and dig in.

The Price is Right

When Tom talks about data field repair for “like 4 cents”, he is using this as an example for how inexpensive it CAN be to repair your database. This example is illustrative of the price per data field when bundled with other products and at volume. Revaluate does not sell individual data fields for $.04 cents. Each contact you have has multiple data fields in your CRM, not just one. IE: “First Name” is one data field. To be clear, our minimum data repair fee is $200.

Scale matters. Just like Costco, Revaluate offers a volume discount. Only we don’t sell a 55 gallon drum of mayonnaise, but rather data by the thousands of fields. So, the best Revaluate pricing is reserved for the largest databases.

We also offer discounted pricing for bundled products … much like say, State Farm Insurance. Enterprise level agreements allow for further discounts when automation, white labeling, reselling, and integrations are factored in. There is no one size fits all pricing because most of our clients needs and wants are vastly different.

Upgrades are Good

Previously, Revaluate offered services that are no longer available. As with any business, we add and remove products based on demand and to some extent, profitability. We also remove products that are deemed risky. The changes that the government has made to the TCPA and the accompanying FCC changes to email spam caused increased risk to You, and Revaluate. Thus, we decided to discontinue products like Reside (our farm tool) and to stop appending email and phone numbers to datasets as of 1/1/25.

Previously, I believed that Bigger Databases Win more often. While this still holds some merit, the risk of having a large database without quality has grown. Based on Tom Ferry’s advice, we now focus on pruning databases—removing outdated or irrelevant data—so you can concentrate on a more targeted, high-quality dataset. To align with this need, we are upgrading our services accordingly.

The True Cost of Bad Data

From our case study with Tom, we know that 50% of data is missing or wrong in the average agents database. So, let’s look at what the cost of that bad data is, annualized. To do so, we need to consider a few factors. So play along with these numbers or substitute your own real numbers. I used round numbers for ease.

Assumptions:

Total Prospects in database: 2,000

Bad Data Percentage: 50% → 1,000 prospects are unusable (wrong or missing information).

Conversion Rate: Assume a 5% conversion rate (industry average varies, but 2–5% is typical).

Average Commission Per Sale: Assume $10,000 per transaction (varies by market, but reasonable for many regions).

Annual Engagement Rate: The agent actively engages the full database once per year.

Lost Business Calculation:

Lost Leads Due to Bad Data: 1,000 x 5% = 50 lost deals

Lost Revenue: 50 deals x $10,000 = $500,000 per year

Conclusion:

The average real estate agent would be losing $500,000 annually in commissions due to incorrect or missing data. This highlights the importance of maintaining a clean and updated database to maximize conversions.

Secondarily, there is additional cost / spend / waste for the time and money spent working the bad data prospects that we did not include. Both of these combined total the true cost of bad data.

The cost of lead gen failure and missing out on transactions vs the meager cost of database repair. It’s this VAST disparity that matters to Tom.

Organization For The Win

A crucial part of this repair process is not just identifying bad data but also ensuring your remaining contacts are accurate and usable. Revaluate has a Data Nerd service available to help agents organize, format, merge and de-duplicate spreadsheets, files and CRM data. This ensures your contact list is clean and functional. This has a minimum fee of $49, and includes an hour of work. Most of our customers only need an hour’s time to get things situated, and it would take them more than a day to do so themselves. You may notice that our pricing is significantly below market rates. That’s intentional—we want to make data cleanup accessible because we know it’s not a fun task, and cost shouldn’t be a barrier. The result? A well-organized database that delivers Industry leading ROI, so you can leave your competition in the dust.

Get your FREE database audit here: http://revaluate.com/free