As I look back on everything that happened at Inman Connect Now last week, it’s clear just how different things are in real estate this year. For one thing, I never thought I’d see the day this belly-to-belly business held massive conferences completely online.
And that’s just one adaptation the industry’s made. Many have moved to a digital-first workflow, trying to find the tools they need to work online the same way they’d worked before.
Real estate and tech companies have been stepping up to help, working together to find solutions for agents and brokerages. You might have run into Lone Wolf Marketplace at Connect Now, a new service built through huge collaborations across the industry to help agents find the right digital tools when they need them most. You might have also seen our hints of a new digital end-to-end platform coming soon.
There’s more to these advancements than meets the eye. They represent a massive shift in how we—agents, brokerages, tech companies, consumers—work together to buy and sell homes.
This is a critical time for real estate tech
History shows us that when technology advances like it has these last few months, we rarely go back.
Think about it. Would any of us revert to a car we had to crank to start? Would we go back to typewriters? Would we even go back to pagers instead of smartphones? Unlikely.
Real estate is going through a rapid tech evolution right now. The industry’s advanced to a point where everything involved in a real estate transaction can be done digitally and remotely, and it’s quickly become normal for all of us.
Now, as things return to some semblance of the normal we knew before, we’re left to reconcile old methods and new. We need to figure out how to balance high-tech and high-touch all over again. How do we make sure that real estate professionals and brokers can stay at the forefront of the industry—and their clients’ minds—in a time of critical tech transition?
It all comes down to the transaction
Ultimately, a transaction is what brings people together in real estate—brokers, agents, buyers, sellers, admins. It makes sense since that is the reason the industry exists in the first place!
The transaction can act as a hub for everything that happens in the real estate experience. And it can be done digitally from start to finish, from essential services for buyers and sellers to accounting and insights. Through the transaction, you can provide your trademark personal touch but in a new, digital way.
The technology already exists for this to happen. Lone Wolf’s new curated library of digital tools, Marketplace, connects essential services like title insurance and earnest money deposits directly to the transaction solutions every agent in the country has access to through zipForm Plus or TransactionDesk. So agents across the U.S. can provide the full-fledged digital experience their consumers need right now.
What’s next for the real estate experience?
When you think of the experience we should strive for in real estate, think of how other industries have done it. Netflix flipped the entertainment industry on its head by making it possible to watch shows online. Adobe transformed the creative industry by giving professionals a single package with everything they needed, online. Google, well, you know all about them.
That’s why Marketplace is only the beginning for us. The same kind of end-to-end digital experience, inspired by industry leaders like Netflix, Adobe, and Google, is coming soon for everyone in real estate—whether you’re an agent, brokerage, franchise, or team.
And it’s coming sooner than you think.
Lone Wolf provides a full suite of connected technology for real estate brokerages and agents across North America, from transactions to back office, accounting, and insights. Through Marketplace, Lone Wolf’s recently-launched hub, agents and brokers can connect everything from web solutions and CRM to digital trust/escrow and title to their Lone Wolf transaction solutions. Click here to learn more about what’s coming next in the end-to-end experience for real estate.