Global Wolf Broker Website and Extranet

Introduction

Lone Wolf is a real estate technology company that cut its teeth in the development of real estate brokerage financial management systems (Since 1989). As their company has grown and evolved, they have leveraged their understanding of technology and broker business practices to diversify their product offerings to include broker website solutions. Today, their offerings support the broker’s customer relationship from inception as a prospect through settlement of the transaction.

Login

The most common support call to technology companies today is “I can’t log in.” You will see that Lone Wolf has done an excellent job of making username and password retrieval fully automated. This access gateway is also tied to the user permissions functionality of the back office management solution. Understanding that different people in the broker organization need different access to information is key to the success of any enterprise broker website. Agents need to have access to a set of information, office managers need access to more, the broker need access to even more. Given the complex preferences that brokers have for issuing permissions, Global Wolf offers the broker the ability to create permission profiles and associate access to areas of the extranet to meet the preferences of the broker. Aside from typical permissions like broker, office, staff, or agent – custom views can be configured for teams, affiliates, or any other custom category required by the broker.

Home Page

At the heart of the Extranet start page is the customizable desktop. This desktop is customizable in ways similar to many MLS systems. Depending on the user’s log in, the information that appears will adapt to their needs. For example, an Agent would see their office events, their open houses, their office links, their office’s new listings, their showings, their floor schedule, office birthdays, etc. This localization of content on the extranet to the user preferences is critical to large, multiple office brokerages. If agents need to sort through all of the information to find what is most important to them, they will not engage in adopting the intranet as a tool. There is also support for affiliate marketing activities on the home page and in other areas of the extranet. This allows the

broker to advertise events, training sessions, and business partnerships like preferred mortgage, title, staging, virtual tour, or whatever else they choose to market to their agents. This is a great opportunity for a brokerage to generate advertising revenue.

Messaging Center

Communication is a key challenge to brokers today. Global Wolf offers support for the many layers of sending messages to agents. The Messaging Center is designed to pull any users email and support outbound email to meet a variety of real estate business needs. Users can message everyone in their company, all clients, all prospects, a single office, a single person, send marketing announcements, configure custom distribution lists, and more. This is also the area where the agent in/out board is managed. The ability for an agent from one office to see who is in another office is a celebrated feature among agents. Agents prefer to call someone they know in another office rather than the desk agent – this solution supports those relationships.

Listing Management

Where possible, Global Wolf accesses the MLS and pulls all listings into the Global Wolf listing utility, keeping the information synchronized with MLS information. Depending on the MLS market, the sync may occur as often as every 15 minutes or daily. The MLS rather than your technology provider usually determine the frequency of the sync.

Global Wolf enters into a three party contract between their company, the broker, and the MLS (or as many MLS as your brokerage is participating). By contract they agree to the terms of use for MLS data and the protection of MLS data to avoid any misuse of the data.

Once the data is integrated into Global Wolf, the broker, agent and team are free to use the data for many business and marketing uses, including property search on the broker website, map search, listings by office, listings by agent, listings by area, etc. Brokers may enhance their listings by adding branded virtual tours, managing open houses, sending out marketing emails with listing information, new listing announcements, etc.

Global Wolf also offers a suite of reports that are helpful to the management of the brokerage and agent listing management. The reports track market share by company, market or agent; days on market by company office or agent, showings by company, market or agent; open houses, even the number of times a listing has been viewed. These reports have a plethora of uses for business management team, marketing team, and support the listing agent in keeping their seller in the center of the activity surrounding their listing.

Agent Business Center

Lone Wolf has leveraged their background in broker business accounting to bring reports into the extranet that allow the office, team or agent to get a federated view of the financial information that is important to them. For example, the agent can pull their commission history anytime. Even keep a record of their expenses.

Enterprise Lead Management and Routing

Every brokerage has different rules regarding lead management and Global Wolf supports them all. Leads can go to an e-team where referral fees to the brokerage can be tracked as leads are sent to agents. Leads can be sent to offices and distributed to a distribution list, or distributed round robin. In cases of specialties, leads can be sent to luxury agents, neighborhood specialists, short sale experts, or any other specific type of rule the broker needs. Leads can also be set to “time out” and be redirected to another agent.

Reports are available to view all leads by company, office or agent. Time to respond, conversion rates, lead source, showings, reassignments and other key matrices are available to manage this valued business sales funnel.

Helpful Resources

Today’s brokerage is moving more toward affiliate marketing than ever before; monetizing business referrals to decorators, inspectors, renovators, landscapers, plumbers and other services homeowners need. To support the broker in this activity, Global Wolf provides an

eConcierge center. This area of the extranet allows members of the company to search for resources, read company descriptions, even view comments and ratings from other agents.

Haves/Wants

Addressing the service demands of agents who have clients with off-market listings or buyers who have special needs – Global Wolf offers Haves/Wants. Agents can list homes that are temporarily off the market, or coming soon to the market and publish those listings throughout the brokerage. Similarly, agents who are looking for a special home may market their buyer’s needs to other agents in the company.

File Management

File Management is fully supported in the Global Wolf extranet. The company may publish all forms and make them available to agents, offices, or administrators of the company. Additionally, any user may set up as many personal file folders as they would like. This is an enormous benefit to any real estate brokerage. Online file storage and management reduces costs and supports Green Real Estate.

Web Manager

With Global Wolf web manager, the broker is in control of their entire online universe. They can dynamically add and remove pages on their public website as easily as editing a Word document. The broker may also create office websites and agent websites. Utilizing the same permission structure throughout the extranet, agents are given access to manage their own website, complete with custom co-branding and images. Offices may also manage the their local area look and feel and offer pages of website information specific to their area. Global Wolf supports global management of these sites without compromising in unique needs of offices, agents or teams. With web manager, the broker can maintain their business brand – its look, feel, and promise without hindering the efforts of agents.

Summary

Lone Wolf is a product company, not a project company. The technologies they offer their clients are designed to be standardized not customized. This gives Lone Wolf the ability to continually build modern functionality and upgrade all of their client sites. One-off custom sites do not support this flexibility. This philosophy allows the broker to keep current, build a long term vendor relationship, increase agent usability, and reduce technology bugs.

To learn more about Lone Wolf Technologies, click here.

To learn about other broker website offerings, click here.