“The Product Manager ensures progression of product planning and execution throughout the product life cycle, including: gathering and prioritizing customer requirements, aligning with strategic plan and product vision of engineering and executive staff, setting and meeting product development timelines, and customer support to ensure satisfaction goals are met. The Product Manager will report to RESO’s CEO and ensure that products support the company’s overall strategy and goals.”
“RESO’s Membership Manager is responsible for coordinating logistics and details in membership and events as needed to support the organization’s strategic plan. The Membership Manager will report directly to the Chief Operating Officer.”
“The Software Engineer – Middle Tier is keenly able to architect, build and support end-to-end technological solutions that precisely address the business challenges of an application built on a vast collection of real estate information. This engineer is a superstar .NET Core / C# middle tier developer while also extremely proficient at SQL Server data layer development. The Software Engineer will utilize the latest technology stacks, frameworks, business intelligence products and cloud features to enable the RPR platform to best serve real estate practitioners.”
Late last year when Dan and I began talking to the people at Lone Wolf we weren’t actively shopping W+R Studios, but their interest in us made us stop and think. We always enjoyed working with many companies and industry players in organized real estate and proptech. We had relationships with different MLS vendors, portals, brokers, agents, and we wanted to keep it that way. Lone Wolf had a similar model. As we have recently seen, warranted or not, perception about what company is buying you can have drastic implications.
We also wanted to leverage what we saw as our unique position in the real estate space. If you think about it, a comparative market analysis report (CMA), is the first digital representation of a property that could potentially become a listing. So adding a CMA to the tech stack, at the beginning, of a forms and transaction management solution made perfect sense. Lone Wolf was the first to really understand this vision, and the fact that our subscribers were doing close to 300,000 Cloud CMA reports a month (and growing) showed we had the ability to drive good adoption.
Another factor is that at W+R, we always struggled to grow our broker channel and Lone Wolf had a very strong broker sales channel. While many brokers choose to purchase a branded Cloud CMA theme to differentiate themselves from other brokers using Cloud CMA, they rarely opted for the full Cloud CMA broker edition. This was the case in markets where Cloud CMA was offered as a member benefit and markets where it was not. Our value proposition wasn’t strong enough.
So today I’m really excited to talk about the new Cloud CMA for Brokers. We have made a few major enhancements and additions and I’m really pleased with the results. First off, the new Cloud CMA for Brokers is now integrated with both Lone Wolf’s Transactions solutions (zipForm and TransactionDesk Edition). Agents can go from the listing presentation to the listing agreement, to inputting the listing into their MLS system, getting all esignatures, to the purchase agreement without rekeying the same fields over, and over, and over again. And if the broker is using Lone Wolf’s Back Office solution they can account for everything and cut a commission check to the agent once the listing is sold. It’s truly amazing end to end solution and I think brokers are going to love this new integration.
The experience is bi-directional too. So if the agent’s workflow begins in Transactions, they can also start a CMA from there. Craig Rowe at Inman News had a good article about all the integration this morning.
Also, everyone understands that listings are gold. This is especially true in this market. So we are also adding Homebeat to Cloud CMA for Brokers. Homebeat is a great way for agents to stay in touch and re-engage clients. Now every agent in the brokerage will get a Homebeat account. Homebeat has proven to be a great way to generate new listings. Here’s a quote from Greg Fox at Better Homes & Gardens,
“I was one of the first company to implement Homebeat..one of my top agents listened to their admin who said, “we should at least try it”. Next day, they had 6 listing leads, and phoned to thank me.” – Greg Fox
Along with these new features the Cloud CMA for Brokers also includes:
– Branded Theme (Both printed and Live) (optional) – Broker Dashboard – Roster management – Broker CMA Preview – Direct support – Homebeat -New! – Transactions integration – New!
A few disclaimers here. In order to take advantage of the listing input feature, MLS providers need to have the MLSConnect turned on as part of their MLS integration. Typically the listing input functionality falls in two camps, zipForms with Paragon MLS and TransactionDesk with Matrix. Just call us if you have any questions.
Just as before, Cloud CMA for Brokers is an additional cost to brokers where Cloud CMA is offered to agents as a member benefit. We have special launch pricing available to these markets too. Just visit us here.
Also, we are adding the Transaction integration to the full Cloud Agent Suite which now includes Cloud CMA + Homebeat, Cloud Streams, Cloud MLX, Cloud Attract and the Transaction integration. That means if an agent wants this integration but their broker has not signed up, they have a path to do so.
Of course, this is just the beginning. We will now get important feedback from our customers to make the integration better.
Lone Wolf is now waaaaaaaay ahead in giving brokers a truly end to end digital transaction experience. By adding Cloud CMA to the beginning of the transaction, along with the whole Cloud CMA Live virtual listing presentation experience, I like to say brokers are giving themselves a head start in the listing race.
Thanks for taking the time for reading this long post. Stay safe, and I hope to see everyone soon.
“Unfortunately,” continued Florance, “current residential listing sites do not serve the interests of homeowners or their agents as they focus on selling advertisements on top of agent listings and increasingly offer competing brokerage services. These sites generate a portion of their revenue from directing potential homebuyers away from the listing agents to unrelated buyer agents that are advertising on top of listing agent listings. This is a practice we plan to no longer continue. Our plan in bringing Homesnap and Homes.com together is to help agents market their listings in support of the ‘your listing, your lead’ philosophy – which stands in contrast to most players in the industry.”
$156M seems pretty cheap when you compare to the ShowingTime deal at $500M and Homesnap deal at $250M. I guess I thought they were bigger than they were.
I still don’t know how CoStar makes any money selling only to listing agents, without IDX going away, which is problematic think this “your listing, your lead” rhetoric is still problematic towards MLS and organized real estate. There might be an interesting culture clash with many in the company.
What some may not realize is that Homes.com (due to them previously being remax.com’s MLS data supplier) has one of the largest, if not the largest MLS data aggregation platforms in the space, and now all that data is controlled by CoStar.
This week on Alley Cats I’m discussing why I think MLS organizations need to raise dues now. Don’t agree? Fight me on Clubhouse. One hour. One topic. Not recorded.
“Alongside Greg Robertson, Head of Enterprise Sales, Warner will further the company’s mission to simplify real estate for agents across North America. Lone Wolf’s end-to-end digital solutions help franchisors ensure that their agents can rise to the increasing consumer demand for a digital real estate experience. From CMAs, Transactions, to eSignature, and more, Lone Wolf gives agents a connected experience from lead to close and beyond.“
Lone Wolf’s mission is to make real estate simpler and provide an end-to-end solution for real estate agents and brokers,” said Greg Robertson. “John Warner is the perfect addition to our team as an industry veteran and will help drive the important conversations we need to be having right now with franchisors, MLS organizations, and associations: How to guide their agents as the industry continues to change at warp speed.”
I’ve known John a while and I’m super happy he chose Lone Wolf. He fits right in with the crew and has already hit the ground running.
The first 4 months at Lone Wolf have been an awesome learning experience for me. Lone Wolf and W+R Studios have always had mutual customers, and I was always aware of the forms and transaction management business but now I’m getting a full immersion course. What I’m learning the most is this, at scale, it’s a tough business. I know that competition is starting to rise in this space, I would only say to them, be careful what you wish for.
With that in mind, I sat down to talk with Lone Wolf’s CEO, Jimmy Kelly. I was surprised but not surprised that he agreed to do this interview with me. I don’t think we made any edits or cut anything out, it’s about 30 mins long and worth the watch. Jimmy answered all my questions, even the tough ones (check out the timeline), and I still have a job!
Hope you enjoy and see how running a form business during the beginning of a worldwide pandemic is a little like Lucy and Ethel working at the chocolate factory.
Timeline:
:40 – Introduction to Jimmy, and history in software industry
4:20 – Greg and Jimmy discuss forms changes and frequency of requests
5:15 – Looking back on pandemic, COVID requests, and response from Lone Wolf
9:30 – Greg asks about product outages, instability. Jimmy discusses what’s going on at Lone Wolf.
12:00 – Greg: What do you say to customers who’ve heard that before?
16:05 – Jimmy discusses future of Back Office.
17:45 – Greg: Are Transactions (zipForm Edition) and Transactions (TransactionDesk Edition) eventually going to merge?
20:00 – Greg: What do you say to customers who want you to focus on current issues rather than innovating/buying companies?
23:45 – Jimmy previews what he’s most excited about coming soon from Lone Wolf
29:00 – Greg: What can you share about Stone Point Capital acquiring CoreLogic?
A short video the Notorious R.O.B. created in response to my recent Listing Bits episode with Sam DeBord and Michael Wurzer (many thanks to all for sharing and the positive feedback we have been getting about the LEAP podcast episode).
I have to disagree with Rob’s take on limiting the MLS member’s value proposition to just “servicing the client” and leaving “acquiring the client” to some sort of neo-syndication play. The fundamental core value behind the MLS is “you help me sell your listings, and I’ll help you sell yours, and we will both get paid.” I believe the spirit of that contract always had customer acquisition in mind.
Whether you agree or not, I’m glad this subject is getting more attention. Check out the links below (which I stole from Rob’s YouTube channel) for more context (Michael is really killing it).
“FBS, the 40+ year leader in developing software and solutions focused on real estate multiple listing services (MLS) is seeking a Product Marketing Manager responsible for developing strategies, campaigns/programs and content that: (a) communicate new features and feature enhancements of existing software and tech, (b) measurably support sales efforts (retention and new revenue development) and (c) bolster product awareness, demand, adoption and engagement across the board with a nationwide population of (non-technical) software users and enterprise clients of varying sizes and experience-levels.
