Transforming A Real Estate Brokerage Into One Known For Its Use Of Technology

Main Street Realty Ltd. was looking for technology that could give the brokerage a marketplace advantage. With dotloop they found a complete real estate transaction management platform that’s transforming their business.

With six offices and a hundred and twenty-two agents, Main Street Realty Ltd. in Toronto, ON has seen impressive growth since it was founded by broker Mike Cartwright just eight years ago. Though located in Canada, where brokerages typically differ from the U.S. in organizational structure, Cartwright has been open to the best strategies from both sides of the border.

Seeing that his clients were using the latest in mobile technology in every other aspect of their lives, he knew it was time for his realty company to make that transition.

At the time Canada had legalized digital signatures, and there were several companies offering this solution. But Cartwright was convinced that in order to be known as a realty firm on the cutting edge of technology, Main Street would need to move to a comprehensive platform.

Making The Client Do The Work

 
The Main Street offices were using a system that could be described as semi-digital. They were composing, editing, and sending their documents electronically (as PDFs). However, the clients were responsible for printing them out, signing them, scanning them, and emailing them back.

This presented two challenges. First, clients couldn’t sign the documents until they had access to a printer. So even if they could review a contract on their mobile device, they couldn’t sign it until they were back in their office—a delay that could cost an entire day.

Second, in order to avoid mailing back the signed documents they had to have access to a scanner and know how to use it. So rather than making the transaction easy and convenient for their client, it placed a technology burden on them.

Mountains Of Paper

 
It also bothered Cartwright that his offices were so dependent on paper.

“The amount of paper we were using was disgusting,” he says. “Each transaction was generating twenty to thirty pages of documents.”

It wasn’t just the overuse of natural resources that he found troubling. Paper documents have to be physically filed and stored. And once archived they can’t be easily searched or moved.

Additionally, a paper contract can only exist in one location at a time. If someone in another office wants to review it, it has to be copied or scanned before it can be sent. If a paper document is revised, all existing copies must be located and replaced.

A Partial Solution Wouldn’t Go Far Enough

 
As stated earlier, Cartwright wasn’t convinced that a stand-alone esignature program would give him the solution he was looking for. Even though it would allow documents to be signed from mobile devices, they ultimately had to be printed out, thus retaining most of the disadvantages of paper.

Cartwright wanted Main Street to make the leap to becoming a completely digital firm. He knew that to achieve that would require an entire platform that would fundamentally change how he, his agents, and admins worked.

In the end, the one solution he found that could deliver all this was dotloop.

Finding The Single Platform Capable Of Doing It All

 
Cartwright was attending a seminar taught by Tom Ferry when he first learned about dotloop. Hearing the U.S.-based real estate training guru recommend the platform, Cartwright began watching online demonstrations of how dotloop worked. The more he learned about it, the more he was convinced that it was just what Main Street Realty needed.

Knowing that the best way to manage change is to lead by example, Cartwright jumped into dotloop with both feet. He attended multiple webinars to learn the basic functions of the platform, and within days he used dotloop to get signatures from a client who was on vacation in a mountain cabin.

To help his whole brokerage more quickly adopt the new technology, he scheduled training sessions twice a week and has given a deadline when everyone must be on board.

How Dotloop Is Transforming Main Street Realty

 
The dotloop platform allows the agents and admins at Main Street Realty to move deals through more quickly, saving time at every step in the process.

Because the brokerage is finally able to move away from paper, clients no longer have to print and rescan documents, and the firm no longer has to keep track of reams of contracts across multiple offices. The most current version of each document is instantly accessible from anywhere.

What’s more, Cartwright sees dotloop as a recruiting tool for new agents.

“No other broker in my area is using a platform like this,” he says. “Agents who want to use the best real estate technology are going to want to work here.”

A New Direction For The Company

 
Cartwright credits dotloop with transforming how his brokerage works.

“It has changed my whole business,” he says. “It’s so much more than electronic signatures. Dotloop is the direction I’m taking the company.”