Crye-Leike is the 6th largest real estate company in America, and 3rd largest independent behind HomeServices of America and Howard Hanna[1]. The firm processes over 30,000 transactions a year across their 3200 agents, 125 offices spanning 9 states. Beyond residential real estate, they operate businesses that provide services in commercial real estate, mortgage, Title Insurance, Property and Personal insurance, property management, and relocation. A few years ago, the company embarked on a program to select a transaction management solution and tie it into their accounting system and CRM system. The result is among the most sophisticated and effective solutions deployed anywhere in the nation.
Crye-Leike may be the largest user of Lone Wolf’s DPN accounting system. This system has been in place for over 30 years and is a product that is not even newly offered to brokers anymore. Companies who are on DPN consider themselves fortunate because it is highly customized to support the real estate industry, especially for companies that operate multiple lines of business. DPN was built on Zortec Compilers (think DOS). Basically, it is really old, absolutely solid as a rock in terms of reliability, and fast as a rocket ship. The 27 accounting people at Crye-Leike operate the system at blazing speed and are absolutely in love with their old dog and would not want to trade it for anything in the world.
Accounting Integration
Until recently, the problem with DPN is that it did not allow for integration with other systems in the brokerage and its future was uncertain. Lone Wolf has since initiated a significant effort to transpose the data that is in DPN into a modern data lake. They have done the same for many of their products including their flagship product brokerWOLF. For companies like Crye-Leike who consider data as an asset, like oil, the data in DPN or other accounting systems is like Kuwait.
CRM Integration
A major initiative at Crye-Leike has been the roll out of Moxi Works CRM, called Moxi Engage. One of the key features in Engage is the ability for agents to set goals and track their progress. Crye-Leike is integrating transaction data from the DPN data lake which has information alike Commissions into Engage so agents can see exactly what they have earned YTD. Normally, this type of tracking requires agents to manage manual data input. By leveraging data as an asset, this is fully automated.
Transaction Management Integration
Another key piece of the puzzle for Crye-Leike is transaction management. A brokerage operating across 9 states with over 40 MLSs and many more Associations of REALTORS saw the selection of Transaction Management as a daunting task. From a system and security perspective, Crye-Leike’s consideration of transaction management came down to a bake off between two industry leaders – DocuSign and Instanet. Two things tipped the scales toward Instanet. First, Lone Wolf purchased Instanet and made a commitment to integration with DPN accounting and Moxi Engage. Secondly, Instanet already has forms licenses in 8 of the 9 states where Crye-Leike operates which is a significant hurdle to those without a strong forms footprint.
Whereas DPN is the data connection to look at agent production data, transaction management allows Crye-Leike to hydrate the sales funnel and integrate customer record data. Lone Wolf is also dropping TM data into the data lake.
Reporting
From the perspective of delivering a data rich CRM platform with commission and transaction management integration, Crye-Leike agents have hit the trifecta. Beyond that, Crye-Leike has also leveraged these integrations to into their business intelligence and reporting tools to create a crystal-clear picture of their business in real time by agent, team, office, region, state, or companywide. In addition, agents are also getting the value of Authentisign, an industry leading e-signature product that has been used in over 12 million signing events this year alone, also delivered by Instanet/Lone Wolf and fully integrated into the platform.
Customer Support
WAV Group broker and MLS clients know our belief that relationship with your technology vendors and customer support are far more important than price, features, or functionality. Gurtej Sodhi, Crye-Leike Chief Information and Operations Officer, has joined the Lone Wolf advisory board. More than ever, he believes that Lone Wolf led by Patrick Arkeveld has made great strides to improve the customer support and align their development roadmap with integration needs of their clients. Sodhi also specifically called out the excellent work done by Instanet’s Steve Mapes and Joe Kazzoun “I never had to follow up or ask Steve or Joe for anything twice.” Sodhi says that this project would have never been accomplished without the willingness of everyone to work together.
The Future
No doubt, Crye-Leike has taken a major leap forward in technology though this project. The next area of focus will be in Artificial Intelligence. One use case example that he mentioned is that if an agent wants to create a listing for a client in an area like Atlanta, the system will be smart enough to look at the subject property record, look at the customer record, and automatically pull the right forms packet and fill it out with data on hand. Today, this process is data enabled, but not smart enough to know what forms to use. The agent needs to select them.
However, Instanet has built smart forms systems in the past for brokerages covering multi-states and jurisdictions, so they have the experience to deliver the desired solution.
[1] Real Trends 500 – https://www.realtrends.com/rankings/real-trends-500-by-volume18
