This article was originally published on Inman.com, and has been extended below.
Who cares about the real estate client experience?
Brokers do. They’ve got CRM tools coming out the wazoo.
Agents do. They answer phone calls on family vacations.
Administrators do. They work overtime to keep everyone up to date.
Buyers do. They need their offers submitted fast, no surprises.
Sellers do. They want the best price (!) and a smooth deal.
But for all this caring, why is the client experience still so difficult?
It may not be sexy, but what the real estate client experience is missing is a simple, digital, end-to-end transaction management process.
What clients expect from real estate transactions
Real estate consumers conduct almost all of their home-related behavior on the Internet—listing searches, Pinterest decorating, VR showings, and so on.
They expect to be able to do the same with their transactions.
Research shows that online signature use worldwide has grown 747% from 2012 to 2017. This increase corresponds, for example, with the usage of our eSignature solution, Authentisign—which has risen a whopping 4,300% from half a million documents signed in 2012 to 22 million in 2017, according to our own data.
In that same time period, we also saw a 147% increase in digital form creation and a 2,400% increase in digital document storage in our transaction management platform.
What do these numbers tell you?
Consumers want and expect a digital real estate experience—and transactions are at the center of it all.
What clients actually get from real estate transactions
Most brokerages know what digital transaction tools they need to give their agents to provide to clients. According to NAR:
- 79% of brokerages provide eSignature
- 81% provide electronic contracts and forms
- 55% provide document management tools
And most—if not all—have some kind of back office or accounting software to pay their agents and outside parties.
The problem is that few of these tools are connected.
Having this many disconnected tools means that agents and administrators must enter the same information in different places. And then, when a missing contact needs to be added or the sell price changes at the last minute, they have to do it all over again.
This creates confusion between agents and administrators and clients, altering or even threatening important deadlines.
Agents may not get paid. The broker’s reputation may diminish in the marketplace. And the client’s deal is put in needless doubt.
Obviously, that’s not the transaction experience anyone wants.
Improve the transaction experience for agents, clients, and the brokerage
At Lone Wolf, we believe that connecting these various tools and the people who use them is the next step to improving the real estate transaction experience.
And that means creating a complete, end-to-end transaction solution.
A complete solution that will ensure that up-to-date information is shared instantaneously between all of the programs and parties in a transaction. One that will help eliminate the duplicate data entry and confusion that arises from:
- Last-minute changes to price, commissions, and closing details
- Missing information from agents on offer sheets
- Forms that are incomplete or missing signatures
That’s why we’ve built our transaction management system the way we have. A better transaction experience is only possible with better connections—with a complete technology system that can handle every step, from creating, updating, and signing an offer to submitting it to the back office, without details getting lost in translation.
This complete solution gives agents, clients, and the brokerage the simple and digital transaction experience they all demand.
It gives agents the tools to manage their deals anywhere, without driving all over for signatures or to submit paperwork.
It gives clients the ability to sign for the house of their dreams without having to wait for meetings.
And it gives brokerages the ability to track, approve, review, and finalize transactions without chasing agents, missing signatures, or spending hours going over sheafs of paperwork.
Commit to your clients’ real estate experience
In the years ahead, what clients want from your brokerage will evolve. Trends will come and go. Markets will rise and fall. But your brokerage’s commitment to the clients’ real estate experience should be as steady as the sunrise. Especially when it comes to transactions.
Because what’s more important in real estate than the deal?
