Lean, Mean Brokerage Machine: Technology Empowers Firm to Operate with Zero Debt

Cory Kammerdiener is a military veteran who applied the technical skills he honed as an Electronic Technician in the U.S. Navy to running a real estate brokerage with minimal overhead and no debt.

He accomplishes this by operating his company, NewHomePrograms.com, virtually. The firm has 55 agents and eight brokers in six major cities across Texas and Florida. Rather than leasing physical offices and hiring staff in each of those places, Kammerdiener leans on technology to close transactions, engage his agents, and bring in new business.

"If you look at any other real estate company that has offices in as many cities as we do, they probably have a broker, an office manager and someone answering the phones," says Kammerdiener. "But I'm pretty much a one-man operation. I'm the accountant and lead coordinator. I do payroll and transaction management. I'm literally filling in for probably 10 different people that a typical real estate company has to hire. I can do it all because of the software I use."

Kammerdiener uses four programs, all integrated with each other, from Lone Wolf Real Estate Technologies to achieve this:

• brokerWOLF, for accounting needs like managing commission structures, tracking expenses and listing inventory, and real-time reporting.
• WOLFconnect, a virtual front office management system that helps agents working remotely stay connected to the brokerage.
• loadingDOCS, a document and transaction management platform.
• globalWOLF, a website solution that automatically syncs online leads to WOLFconnect's built-in CRM.

"We first built the company with the idea that brokerWOLF and WOLFconnect were going to be the foundation," Kammerdiener says. "We wanted to be able to grow not only in our city, but in other cities, as well. Lone Wolf allows me to expand our operations without having to hire a bunch of employees."

Kammerdiener estimates that he saves approximately $80,000 per year, per office, just by not having to hire an office manager and a transaction manager. "With this software, I don't have to have those people. The money I save by not having to pay salary is dumped into marketing. That's why we get so many people to our website."

Running Lean with brokerWOLF

According to Kammerdiener, he chose Lone Wolf because he considers their back office solution the strongest accounting application available to real estate brokerages. "It was the first software I saw that integrated real estate operations with accounting," he says. "That was important, because once a brokerage starts bringing income in, you have to make sure your paperwork, your income, and all of that is in order because we're so highly regulated."

brokerWOLF's comprehensive reporting capabilities allows Kammerdiener to closely monitor the financial health of his business. His most-used report is the Pending Transaction Report. "I can see all my office transactions so I always know how many deals we have on the books," he says.

Kammerdiener also taps into brokerWOLF to report his agents' monthly gross sales through the Agent Ranking by Commission Report. This report shows the volume of sales per agent, and "ranks" them. "It helps everybody know what everybody else is doing."

The Power of WOLFconnect and globalWOLF Combined

Kammerdiener's brokerage model operates on a commission split. He does all the marketing and then hands those leads to his agents. "I needed a platform to funnel all those leads to my agents," he says. He uses globalWOLF to manage his firm's website and capture online leads. Those leads are then sent from globalWOLF to WOLFconnect's integrated CRM.

"You can't really have one without the other," he says, noting the synergistic relationship between the two programs. "If you have tons of leads coming through your website, but don't have a CRM, you're going to have a problem. If you have a CRM, but you don't have tons of business going into it, then you're going to have a problem."

Fortunately, once leads come in from globalWOLF, managing those leads in WOLFconnect and keeping them engaged is simple for Kammerdiener's agents. All they need to do is call a new web lead, engage them and qualify them. Once qualified, they can change the prospect's status to qualified, automatically triggering drip marketing campaigns to keep the lead in the sales funnel.

"This is an industry where people don't like using database management," says Kammerdiener. "But my guys like it because their money is tied into it. It's how they manage a high volume of clients. I can give one new agent 30 clients in his first month. How could you really manage the clients without using a CRM?"

Aggressive Growth Powered by Technology

One surprising application of Kammerdiener's technology use is how it's enabled him to partner with other brokers.

"Not every broker can adapt to technology," he says. "Brokers normally have a desire to have a team or to operate their own brokerage, but they sometimes struggle with the technological aspects of the business. Using Lone Wolf, we can offer them an awesome opportunity to join our team."

How? Kammerdiener attracts them by taking care of all the back office administration, marketing, and beyond. "With technology, we assure brokers that they can build their business without all the hassles because we take care of all the payroll; we take care of all the lead management for their agents, and the transactions. So using technology from Lone Wolf, I'm actually taking over all the non-income producing tasks that consume a broker's time."

He pauses. "I can say that we wouldn't have the company if it wasn't for Lone Wolf Real Estate Technologies."

Next Steps

• To learn more about Lone Wolf, visit their website
• Learn about other options for accounting, back office and document management solutions