Transaction Management Platforms

It is inevitable that Online Transaction Management Platforms will be pervasive in the Real Estate industry at some point in the relatively near future. I’ve heard numbers from agents saying that it saves them 30% of their time per transaction. It saves agents, ancillary service providers, and consumers, time. That said, more players are jumping into the game…

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending upon your point of view, that means more choices, and more research to determine which one best suits you. A comment was made to my last post asking me to help “understand our options better”. Would that it were that easy!

The list of Online Transaction Management Platforms(let’s call them OTMP’s) actually was far greater several years ago, but among other reasons, the business models were poor for many, and they failed. Another reason being it was simply too soon for the industry to embrace them. Now the list has started to grow again. Some are; SettlementRoom (one that was there years ago and continues to be strong), a new player – NAR’s ‘Relay’, Fidelity’s ‘Transaction Point’ (which they are in the process of making a major push with), Stewart Title’s ‘Sureclose‘, Gurunet, and there are others.

Let me make it clear that my forte is Contact Management, and Transaction Management within those tools. I’ll try to make that more clear in what follows. As Contact Management Software/Services (also known as CRM’s – Customer Relationship Management) and OTMP’s become more and more intertwined, I continue to invest time expanding my expertise on the latter topic.

One point I would like to make before talking about OTMP’s is not to confuse them with CRM’s. While they are merging more all the time, generally speaking, the latter deals primarily with tracking contacts, lead generation and follow-up, while the former is more geared towards dealing with those contacts from the point of listing the home and/or from the executory agreement of sale date.

While most Real Estate specific CRM tools, such as Top Producer, Agent Office, REST, Active Agent for Outlook, and others, provide very good Transaction Management tools, the primary differences of OTMP’s are the inherent advantages of being online, and the sharing and distribution of documents.

Until relatively recently, OTMP’s have not focused on integrating a truly robust CRM tool with their platforms, and CRM tools, have not integrated a viable online solution to enable sharing of documents. That has been changing. I think it’s simply been a matter of each trying to become the best at what they do, before taking on the momentous task of trying to be both.

That said, the integration of the two has been moving forward to greater and lesser degrees with different products. I am most certainly not familiar with all the OTMP’s, so I am undoubtedly leaving some out, and more than likely short-changing some with respect to their advancements in CRM.

Two of which I am aware that are making moves towards integration are:

SettlementRoom is one of the OTMP’s that has been around the longest, and is now integrated with Sonoma Enterprise’s Active Agent for Outlook – known as SR Producer. The two are also very close to a product that will provide integration for Outlook (independent of the Active Agent for Outlook add-in) with SR. (As it is not yet ready I can’t put up the link. If you would like me to provide you with information when it becomes available, just e-mail me.)

Transaction Point has limited sharing with Agent Office, with further integration possible down the road.

If you’re trying to decide which product, or which combination of products is best for you, you need to determine what your CRM needs are, and if any of the OTMP’s will provide enough in that respect. Some agents don’t do all that much networking; lead generation & follow-up; and mail merging. As those functions are typically the strength of the CRM tools, maybe you lean towards an OTMP with sufficient CRM strength. If you need the CRM strengths, maybe you you don’t have too long of a wait to find an OTMP with strong CRM tools. Maybe it’s out there now. If you are using one, please by all means, share it with us here!

So whatever happened to just listing and selling Real Estate the good ol’ fashioned way, without having to do so much research to find good tools? I guess the same thing that happened to being able to pick out a pair of jeans in 5 minutes?