Brokermint, a back-office real estate business solution that processes 5 percent of the country’s transaction volume, offers tools to further help brokers manage the intricate financials of their offices. They recently added new features that will streamline how brokers calculate and process commissions, so we sat down with Co-Founder and General Manager Andrew Chishchevoy to learn more.
What made Brokermint decide to add accounting to its back office platform?
We looked at the needs of the market and we looked at what our competitors were offering, and we saw a gap. There are, of course, some platforms that offer accounting for real estate. But those tend to be older, less user friendly, installed software packages.
There are some platforms out there that are more modern, but don’t offer true accounting. So we were uniquely positioned to fill that gap. We’ve always been strong in utilizing transaction data in Brokermint to automatically calculate commissions, and taking that through to true accounting—designed specifically for a real estate brokerage—was the natural next step.
Having all this functionality within a user-friendly cloud-based system sets us apart.
Tell us about your newest functionality: the ACH payment gateway.
Every step and process of real estate is accelerating. So anywhere technology can speed things up—and anywhere it can cut out manual human data entry and calculation—will give a competitive edge to the brokerage that adopts that technology.
And in the case of paying your agents electronically via ACH right out of Brokermint Accounting, you achieve both speed and accuracy, and one more extremely important thing: You also achieve agent satisfaction. Have you ever met an agent that didn’t appreciate being paid faster? That’s a big factor in agent retention. In most cases, Brokermint will pay out via ACH on the next business day.
It’s also a natural complement to our Agent Billing gateway. In Brokermint, brokers can charge any recurring fees, like monthly desk or tech fees, via credit card automatically. This has been huge for a lot of our clients who had been struggling with billing and collecting these fees.
How does accounting fit within the larger Brokermint environment?
It’s all about data accuracy and speed. With Brokermint, MLS and CRM data flows in. The transaction is managed to an ontime close, complete with native eSignature. Commissions are calculated in the system without additional data entry, and then all that financial data flows into Accounting as well as into Reporting and Analytics. Data can then also flow into other systems like franchise reporting systems.
The market moves at lightning speed today. Brokerages that want to compete and grow can’t afford the delays of manual data entry, backtracking due to errors, cutting paper checks, and chasing down agent billing. Brokermint cuts all of that out so brokers and agents alike can spend more time serving clients.
Can you tell us about Brokermint eSignature and the mobile app?
Brokermint had offered eSignature for a long time through a technology partner. We determined last year that relying on a third party didn’t give us the control we need to best serve our clients. So we built a native eSignature platform in Brokermint designed specifically for real estate. We released it in the Spring and our clients love it.
Brokermint eSignature offers the most complete eSignature package certificate available. It can be accessed both as an attachment and online. The package certificate also includes a complete timeline of a signer’s actions and secure signature identification. A QR code and a package verification page serve as additional proof of signed document authenticity.
The mobile app provides Brokermint’s back-office management functionality from any device, so busy brokers and agents can manage their back-office business needs from anywhere and at any time. It’s available for iOS and Android.