“Software that’s speedy usually means it’s focused. Like a good tool, it often means that it’s simple, but that’s not necessarily true. Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset.
When demos started going around the company of the new Authentisign the above post by Craig Mod is what I thought of. Of course, you can make software faster in different ways, some are super technical and have to do with how the app is architected on the back end, and the other is the design of how the software works. As the saying goes, “making things simple, is hard“.
I’m not an expert in forms software but learning a lot in my new gig. Over 28 million digital signatures were made using Authentisign last year. Which is pretty crazy. They are rolling out the new Authentisign in phases, so customers will get notified in advance when it comes to their market. ZipForm users won’t see this option until next year.
Previously I had only used DocuSign for sending agreements back and forth. DocuSign is good software, but I prefer the new Authentisign and love the genuine enthusiasm the team of developers at Lone Wolf have for their new baby. Congrats.
“Cambridge, ON and Dallas, TX – July 7, 2021 – Lone Wolf Technologies (“Lone Wolf”) and Minnesota Realtors® are pleased to announce a new agreement that brings real estate’s leading transaction management solutions, Lone Wolf Transactions (zipForm Edition) and Lone Wolf Transactions (TransactionDesk Edition), to the association’s 22,000 members as member benefits in 2022. The new agreement starts in September 2021.
“We’re happy to partner with Lone Wolf in providing digital form and transaction management tools to our members,” said Chris Gellar, CEO of Minnesota Realtors®. “These solutions put functionality and freedom of choice in our members’ hands and lets them spend more time servicing the needs of their clients.”
This is following a recent announcement that the California Association of REALTORS and the Texas Association of REALTORS (LOI) have also chosen to provide Lone Wolf’s Transaction Management Solutions as a free member benefit.
Victor does a great interview. His knowledge of the industry allows him to ask some great questions, and give push back to answers. What Lone Wolf is doing is remarkable – simplifying real estate by acquiring best of class products, and bringing them together in service of the transaction. When you combine that vision with the deep well of financial resources from their private equity partner, Stone Point Capital, the sky is the limit.
“Lone Wolf Technologies (“Lone Wolf”) is excited to announce the acquisitions of two leading real estate technology companies, LionDesk and HomeSpotter. With these acquisitions, Lone Wolf’s end-to-end technology suite now encompasses digital marketing, lead generation, customer relationship management (CRM), showings, comparative market analysis (CMA), digital forms and signatures, transaction management, back office and accounting, business insights, and recruiting. These solutions form the most comprehensive digital technology suite for agents, brokers, MLSs, and associations in real estate today. “
Well, we might not be physically at the NAR Midyear meetings, but I’ve got to think this is one of the biggest announcements during NAR Midyear in a while.
I’ve written about our decision to sell W+R Studios and how we thought that a CMA was a natural fit to what Lone Wolf was trying to accomplish. You can call it end-to-end digital solutions or just simply software that works together. In this way, the acquisitions of Lion Desk and HomeSpotter also make perfect sense. And hopefully, this won’t cause too much consternation with our mutual partners since Lone Wolf has no aspirations of becoming an MLS participant. ????
Dan and I are also excited to work directly with David Anderson and Aaron Kardell and their teams. I know both of them and admire the companies they have built and the software they have created. I’ve interviewed both of them on my Listing Bits podcast. You can listen to my interview with David here and Aaron here.
It will be great to have these two industry leaders part of the Lone Wolf team.
On a recent Facebook post agents are commenting on some sort of notice going out. You remember, Glide was recently acquired by Compass. Can anyone confirm?
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.
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?
“The new feature was made possible through an unprecedented collaborative effort between Lone Wolf and leading title providers, including First American Title Company and WFG National Title, and leading title software providers, including SoftPro and RamQuest, with many more on the way and planned for 2021. Through these individual partnerships, Lone Wolf has created real estate’s first direct integration between real estate agents and title agents and made it available to every real estate agent and brokerage in the U.S. through the member benefit, Lone Wolf Transactions. The national launch of Digital Title Orders kicks off today with First American Title, while those using the RamQuest title production system are also able to get their title companies onboarded within Transactions to connect to their customers. By the end of 2021, Lone Wolf plans to onboard 80% of title companies.”
It’s crazy the amount of scale that Lone Wolf has in the market. 1.5 million agents, 125 million forms per year and 22 million digital signatures. But scale is a double edged sword.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been learning a lot about forms, transaction management, and brokerage accounting/back-office software. Due to zipForm’s partnership with NAR, it has the most forms coverage of anyone in the market. That also means they (we) have a lot of challenges as well. For instance, I learned last week that we get over 150 form change requests a week. A week! That is spread between two different software platforms – Zipforms and TransactionDesk. Each platform has separate processes for updating and creating new forms. In many markets, that’s one form, but twice the work. It’s a struggle. It can mean customers waiting longer than they want for forms updates. It’s painstaking work – I mean, it’s literally a legal document. I’ve talked to many of you and it’s clear that there is room for improvement. But that’s another blog post.
On the other side of the coin, what scale can also do is bring a great benefit to a lot of people in a very short amount of time. That’s what I believe is the significance of the launch of Digital Title. Starting with First American and those using the RamQuest title production system agents get a lot of benefits. It’s pretty amazing.
-One-click title orders in Transactions -Automatic status tracking -In-product chat with your title agent -Secure document sharing -One-click order cancelations -Accurate data at closing with real-time sync
This works both with zipForms and TransactionDesk. Digitizing the process of ordering Title is just one innovation that is making things easier for agents and brokers. With brokerages that have JV agreements with title companies, it can dramatically improve capture rates.
I can’t wait to share another innovation Lone Wolf is launching next month that starts at the very beginning of a transaction. Can you take a guess? : )
The new CREA WEBForms® will be powered by Lone Wolf’s TransactionDesk®, an industry-leading document and transaction management system. The new CREA WEBForms® includes unlimited document storage, forms, MLS® integration and agent-level transaction management.
“Our members’ business needs have changed since the creation of CREA WEBForms® and they continue to evolve,” stated Michael Bourque, CREA’s CEO. “CREA WEBForms® needs to adapt to changing needs in a timely fashion, integrate with board and association MLS® Systems and other third-party tools used by members across the country.”
If I’m reading this right it sounds like Lone Wolf just site licensed a whole country. Nice work!
