Lone Wolf Technologies announced Monday that its partnership with transaction management software platform SkySlope will end on Sept. 1. Lone Wolf told Inman that SkySlope opted to not renew the agreement, but SkySlope says Lone Wolf canceled the auto-renewal agreement and offered a new contract at a price increase.
Under the partnership, SkySlope’s system was integrated into zipForm Plus, Lone Wolf’s transaction management platform, which is offered to the roughly 1.3 million members of the National Association of Realtors as a membership benefit.
“It’s always a challenge to navigate partnerships with your competitors,” Jimmy Kelly, CEO of Lone Wolf, said in a statement. “We did everything in our power to maintain this mutually beneficial arrangement for our customers. Unfortunately, SkySlope had other ideas.”
SkySlope is a tool that aims to “streamline the transaction process,” according to its website. The tool boasts of built-in real-time compliance tracking, a streamlined audit review process with customized checklists and built-in brokerage analytics.
The partnership, according to a Lone Wolf spokesperson, entailed an integration called zipForm Embedded, which allowed SkySlope users to fill out zipForms within SkySlope. The integration allowed users of SkySlope to access the forms they needed from zipForm in SkySlope, which doesn’t have a native forms editor according to the Lone Wolf spokesperson.
A spokesperson for SkySlope told Inman that, after the cancellation, Lone Wolf offered a chance to renew the partnership with a fee increase that was 17 times the original, removal of a co-marketing agreement, on a one-year term.
“Upon Lone Wolf’s notice of cancellation, we looked at the data and found only 7 percent of our subscribers were actively using the integration,” Buck Avey, vice president of product for SkySlope, said in a statement. “Then when Lone Wolf presented the new terms of renewal, specifically the 17-fold increased cost, we decided it was better to invest in a product that would provide more value to our users.”
Lone Wolf does offer a rival transaction management platform, which was bolstered by the acquisition of zipLogix in April. At the same time, SkySlope is also building its own forms, based on customer feedback.
“SkySlope’s vision is to keep agents and brokers connected to the customer forever and part of that is saving them time by providing great tools and integrations,” SkySlope CEO Tyler Smith said in a statement. “Even with the zipForm integration, our customers have voiced that they want a more seamless experience which is why we’ve been building a new forms product for the better half of this year.”
Agents and brokerages often pull from a variety of technology vendors offering different solutions, but many of them integrate together. In fact, Lone Wolf is currently expanding its ecosystem of partners. It recently announced it would integrate its own transaction management solutions with Real Estate Webmasters, a real estate startup that offers a customer relationship management tool, lead generation and marketing tools for agents.
“We’re aggressively expanding our ecosystem to include a variety of leading technology providers,” Jason Cheverton, director of ecosystem at Lone Wolf, said in a statement. “With this ecosystem in place, Lone Wolf is marching toward an unheralded marketplace for the real estate industry, one that integrates front office, CRM, transaction management, back office and accounting, and ancillary services solutions, and includes many great partners.”
UPDATE: Updated with comment from SkySlope.
