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 and digital 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 do the same with their transactions.
Research shows that online signature use worldwide has grown 747% from 2012 to 2017 (Statista.com). This increase corresponds with the usage of our own eSignature solution, Authentisign, which has risen 4300% from .5 million in 2012 to 22 million in 2017 (per 2017 Instanet Solutions System Data). In that same time period, we also saw a 147% increase in digital form creation and a 2400% increase in digital document storage in TransactionDesk.
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 get from transactions
Most brokerages know what digital transaction tools they need to give their agents to provide to clients. 79% of brokerages provide eSignature; 81% provide electronic contracts and forms; 55% provide document management tools (NAR’s 2018 Report), 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 multiple 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.
That means creating a complete transaction solution.
A complete solution will ensure that up-to-date information is shared instantaneously between all of the programs and parties in a transaction. This will go a long way to eliminating duplicate data entry and the 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
Ideally, this complete solution will give agents, clients, and the brokerage the simple and digital transaction experience they all demand.
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?
Lone Wolf Technologies is committed to improving the real estate client experience through transaction management. Link connects our transaction management system, TransactionDesk, to our back office solution, brokerWOLF, to create a complete transaction management solution. Sending transaction data back and forth between agents and the back office in real-time, Link makes sure everyone is in the know, all the time. Read more about how Link transforms real estate transactions here.