Matt Fischer spent over two decades building products outside real estate before taking the CEO seat at Lone Wolf Technologies this past February. Fischer succeeds Jimmy Kelly, who has remained with the company in an advisory capacity.
Fischer joined Lone Wolf from Bullhorn, a Boston-based software company that builds cloud-based tools for the staffing and recruiting industries. Fischer spent 22 years at Bullhorn helping scale the business from a single-product startup into a multi-product market leader serving more than 10,000 customers worldwide.
Fischer was also recently named to Inman’s new advisory council of senior executives from brokerage, technology, lending and real estate services.
The council is part of “Inman 2.0.” It’s CEO Tom Bohn’s effort to remake Inman from a news publisher into a broader media, membership and community platform, built around persona-driven editorial, AI-enhanced journalism, an evolving Inman Select membership and community infrastructure for real estate professionals.
Four months into his new role at Lone Wolf, Fischer isn’t shy about what he sees in the real estate industry: a fragmented tech stack and too many point solutions chasing artificial intelligence.
Fischer recently sat down with Inman to talk customer experience, why he thinks best-of-breed beats “super-app” proptech platforms, what he notices about real estate media — and his other life as a licensed commercial pilot.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: You took over as CEO at Lone Wolf in February, so it’s been a few months now. What has been your top priority since assuming the role?
Matt Fischer: I came into the business to do a few things, and there are several commitments I’m making to our customers and to the industry.
The first is ensuring we deliver an exceptional experience: How responsive we are, how well-versed our people are in our products and our customers’ challenges, how we consult with them, and how we make sure they’re getting value from the product, rather than being transactional with the customer base.
That’s No. 1: putting our customers at the center of how we think and what we do. I’ve already made a number of changes at the executive level, bringing in people who are really good at driving that kind of transformation from a customer experience perspective.
And it’s not just support. It’s how we listen and observe what customers need from our products, and make sure we have ways to collect feedback and build joint roadmaps and success plans with them. The more customer-focused we become, the better the outcome for everybody — for the industry, for us and for the customers. It’s a win-win. That’s commitment No. 1.
The second is rethinking how agents and brokers use our software and the entire journey they’re on. That was interesting for me, coming in from outside the space with fresh eyes, to see how fragmented the technology experience is in this industry. That’s a huge opportunity for unification and for driving AI across that workflow.
I call it AI, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you call it. The people using our technology should find it easier, faster and more intuitive. It should enable brokerages to reduce costs and agents to be more productive with their time. So we’re taking a fresh look at all of it — transaction management, top-of-funnel products, wherever we can drive that level of productivity for our customers.
You mentioned coming from outside the real estate space. What else have you noticed in proptech and real estate technology that’s different from your background?
Technology leaders often switch verticals, and I think an outside perspective is valuable because it lets you look at things with fresh eyes and without bias. You just look at how people are using things today and think, “Okay, that could be better. I can use technology to fix that.”
The fragmentation surprised me, and the sheer number of tools people need in the real estate industry. The way technology is shaped based on the channel you’re buying it from is also interesting. The agent is the one using it, but maybe they got it as a member benefit and only have a portion of what it can do, or maybe they bought it directly and get the premium version, or maybe they got it through their broker and get some other combination.
That complicates things, but it’s also kind of unique to this industry. At the end of the day, there are many permutations of how the technology comes together, depending on what agents need, who they work for and which associations they’re part of. That was a learning experience for me, and it’s been interesting.
The other thing is AI. There are a lot of point solutions hanging around doing a little bit here and there, such as transaction coordination, compliance, digital advertising and more. I have a pretty strong viewpoint here, and I think it’s true across almost every vertical: Those point solutions exist because the platform players haven’t driven AI through the process yet.
And all those point solutions further the fragmentation problem, because now you’re telling agents and brokers to go find even more tools that don’t integrate or work together. So you’ve solved some problems but created new ones. That’s a big opportunity for companies like Lone Wolf and other platform providers to build this first-party, as part of our own solution, so people don’t have to go buy point solutions and stitch them all together.
Nobody actually wants to do that, and it doesn’t drive the level of efficiency it could. I’ve seen that in my own vertical and in many other places, and I think it’s true here, too. It’s a big opportunity for us to help drive that.
AI is table stakes in every vertical right now, and many people I’ve talked to say there will be more consolidation, with everyone chasing the so-called “super app.” What’s your view on how Lone Wolf approaches that?
I don’t agree with the super app thing. I don’t think that’s where it’s going. The level of depth you need at different steps in the process means there will be best-of-breed applications for each step. Being the best at transaction coordination, transaction management, forms and compliance is a very different skill from being the best at CRM, front office or digital advertising.
I think it’s more about needing an open ecosystem and a platform. Take Lone Wolf as an example. We’re providing the rails for the hard stuff: transaction coordination, management, compliance and back-office operations. We provide the rails, the ecosystem, the APIs. But if a customer wants to bring some other CRM they use, okay, fine.
AI might change this a little, but I don’t think there’s a scenario where it becomes one huge, monolithic thing in which one provider is awesome at everything. I don’t think that’s true.
I think the platform that wins is the one that does the hard stuff, makes it easy, has an open ecosystem, the right APIs and the right integration points, so a brokerage can pick and choose, stitch things into the platform and have it all work well together. You go from 20 point solutions to maybe three.
The idea of the new Inman Advisory Council is to gather opinions from people like you about what the real estate industry needs from media and community platforms. From your perspective, what does the industry really need from a trade media source?
From what I can tell — and again, this is with outside eyes — there’s a spectrum in update velocity and in how “salacious” the news is. It’s my observation that some of it feels almost tabloid-y. You’re getting hit with tons of updates that maybe aren’t inflammatory, but it feels that way. Then there are outlets that are a little slower to give you information, but probably better vetted and less inflammatory in tone.
There’s also just a lot of it, a lot of ways to get information. Coming from the industry I came from, there were a couple of associations, but I wasn’t getting five emails a day from three different outlets as I do now. I have a folder, and it’s like, “I can’t even keep up with this.” That’s been interesting to me.
I don’t know whether that’s beneficial, because there are different audiences here. Do real estate agents consume media at a different velocity than I would? I just don’t have enough information to say whether the audience is getting what it needs.
That’s a general statement about all media right now — we’re inundated with so much information. So many industries are going through monumental change, and media is no different. What excites you about it, and what concerns you?
It’s funny, I was just talking to a friend about this yesterday. The opportunity is something like an AI-based triangulation service. The hardest part — and this has nothing to do with real estate specifically, it’s a broader comment — is that there’s so much content, and so many post-publishing revisions buried in footnotes you’ll never see. All you remember is the headline, even after it’s corrected later.
There was recently an analysis of the political bias of different LLMs, and it was something like 91 percent left-leaning across the board, except for Grok, which was closer to 50-50. That tells you that you don’t really know what you’re getting, and you have to read the same story across different sources and do your own work to triangulate. I find myself doing that constantly. I read it on CNN, then Fox, then check Twitter. It’s frustrating, honestly, because you don’t really know what’s going on.
Obviously, the level of discourse in real estate isn’t nearly as consequential. But I still think the same dynamic applies: the velocity, the different sources. You read about the same story — whatever it is, say the Chicago MLS situation — six different ways. And just like with AI, that puts a lot of burden on the consumer to piece it together.
What’s one thing you’re excited about with the Inman Advisory Council?
I’m pumped about it. If you look at everyone in the room, it’s a well-rounded group. Having been part of advisory councils like this before, my sense is that a good cross-section of people leads to real debate about industry direction and how everyone can support each other.
Selfishly, coming into this space, we’ve got some historical baggage at Lone Wolf, and I’ve got a new way of thinking about and running this business — the customer focus, the innovation, AI. I want to make sure that resonates and actually delivers the results agents and brokerages expect from a platform provider, so a group like this gives good perspective on that.
Last question, and more of a personal one. I noticed on your LinkedIn that you have an FAA pilot license. Was there ever a point when you considered becoming a commercial pilot, and what led you down the path to becoming a tech CEO instead?
I actually am a commercial pilot; I’ve just never flown professionally. I love aviation. I got my private certificate right around the time I graduated from college and have been flying for about 25 years.
I love it as a hobby. It’s one of those interesting things where you need good physical coordination — stick-and-rudder skills — but you also end up having to be pretty well-versed in physics, meteorology, avionics and a bunch of other stuff. It’s unique that way, and it’s a great utility, too. I use it with my family. We fly around, and I’ve flown for charity work.
But I never wanted to do it professionally. If I ever did, it’d probably be flight instruction and teaching other people to fly and helping them pursue their passion. Being an airline pilot was never in the cards for me.
