With two weeks left until Lone Wolf Insights hits the proverbial shelf, we took some time to sit down with Katy Pusch, Product Director of Insights, and help you get to know the mind behind the upcoming platform.
And so, without further ado, meet Katy!
Nice to meet you! Tell us about yourself.
Thank you so much! I’ve built my career delivering data science products that inform, engage, and drive action.
I started out by completing an economics degree that emphasized using econometrics—that’s a type of machine learning—to understand relationships in macroeconomic data. And then I started my career by leveraging that same type of research and analysis to help companies discover relationships in their data that could lead to improved revenue and customer retention.
Now, I partner with internal software teams to develop scalable data science as well as machine learning insights that help our customers understand and improve their outcomes.
Moving to Lone Wolf at the beginning of 2019 was really exciting for me, to enter the real estate industry for the first time—and it’s been an incredible year of partnering with customers and thought leaders in the real estate space to understand the types of problems that we have to solve together and how we can leverage data to solve those problems.
What kind of problems did you see in real estate?
A problem that I’ve spoken to so many industry experts and customers about in the past year is this problem of identifying agents who need coaching, where you should really be spending your time with these agents and understanding what you should be coaching them on.
That’s a problem that I heard time and time again because of the impact that it has to your brokerage’s profitability, and so that’s exactly why that was the most salient problem that we set out to solve with Lone Wolf Insights.
What is Lone Wolf Insights?
Insights is a new solution to Lone Wolf that is purpose-built to help brokerage leaders drive profitability through prescriptive insights that direct agent coaching and retention and deliver interpretive insights into office trends and pipeline. This allows you to drive profitability at your brokerage.
Insights solves the problem of being able to coach and retain your agents to drive your office profitability forward.
Who did you work with to develop Insights?
In addition to countless conversations that we had with customers and thought leaders about the types of problems that we really want to solve and dig into for the real estate industry, we also surveyed our customers, and in two different surveys, one at the beginning of 2019 and then again at the end of 2019, we asked you:
“What are your top priorities for your brokerage? What are your strategic goals for 2019 and then leading into 2020?”
Both times, four of the top five goals are:
- Coaching and improving agent performance
- Achieving a higher company dollar
- Achieving a higher sales volume, and
- Retaining your top agents
These four goals are so interrelated, and they’re exactly the types of problems that Lone Wolf Insights can empower you to drive forward for your brokerage.
Who is Insights for?
Insights is for strategic leaders at a brokerage.
This is the managing brokers who are responsible for office production, this is for regional managers who might be responsible for a number of offices, a whole region, and it’s for the brokerage leadership, the management team, the VP of operations, the CFO, the CEO, the broker/owner; those few folks who are really responsible for driving the strategic direction and the profitability of the brokerage.
Why is Insights made for strategic leaders?
There’s a lot of software in the real estate industry that’s available, and it’s been interesting to me as a relative newcomer to the industry who wants to try to solve problems for these strategic leaders and realize:
There’s very little software that is really purposefully-built for leaders to get in, get the information that they need, drive business forward, and then move on with their day.
Certainly getting in the weeds and having a level of detail is really important for so many roles at the brokerage, but when you’re talking about driving profitability, you don’t need to know the details of every single transaction that your agents at your 1,500-agent brokerage are involved in to be able to drive insights that are going to help you make improvements in your brokerage that drive value for you.
So that’s what Insights is.
We’re pulling out the salient insights that are going to help you drive action so you don’t have to be involved in the minutiae of the day-to-day if that’s not your role.
What actions does Insights inform?
There is action in a few different levels that you can take with this data from Insights. If you’re someone who’s managing more than one office, you can take the action of understanding which of your offices is most in need of a boost in performance.
So for instance, do I have the agents I need? Is my next step going to be recruiting additional agents to this office, or is my next step going to be coaching the agents that I have existing in my office?
If you’re in a situation where you have a specific agent or a handful of agents that are carrying the bulk of sales volume and company dollar for your office, then you might be in a situation where you have risk, and highlighting that risk for yourself allows you to do two things:
- You can really focus on retaining those agents who you are so reliant on, and
- You can focus on building up other agents so that you no longer have all your eggs in one basket.
If you are a managing broker who’s responsible for a specific office, and you’re really focused on those coaching conversations, then you can also leverage Insights to email directly to your agents and sit and have a conversation with your agents and show them the data that you’re looking at for commission split conversations, about what they’re contributing to your brokerage and how that’s informing their commission split, as well as if they’re not doing enough in sales volume or if they’re not negotiating high enough commissions on their listings or on their transactions, then you can coach them on aspects of that as well.
So there’s a number of insights that are going to drive these different action points and these different conversations in your brokerage.
What makes Insights different?
There’s two things that make Lone Wolf Insights different, and one of the things I want to emphasize is that it’s part of our back office suite at Lone Wolf, and so part of the power of Lone Wolf Insights is the database that it’s built on.
brokerWOLF is a tremendously powerful best-in-class back office solution that we’re so thrilled to deliver to our customers.
Lone Wolf Insights leverages that same data.
What we’re doing with that data is also what makes Insights different. So instead of throwing the data at you like a kitchen sink—“Here’s all the fields, build the report that you want”—
We’ve done the research to identify the problems that we know you’re trying to solve.
We know that you need to coach your agents, we know that you need to improve profitability and that these are the things that are really important to you. We’ve purpose-built this product with the insights that you need to drive that action forward. We’ve done all the hard work for you; we want to deliver this to you and let you do the hard work of coaching your agents and running your brokerage, not the hard work of being a data scientist.
