Brokers Beware! That Old Tech Is Eating at Your Profits

Brokers and owners often view back office systems as an afterthought.

This is because they aren't seen as revenue drivers. In fact, back office accounting platforms for the real estate industry have historically been expensive, with non-cloud based software that is a frustrating user experience, requires manual data entry, and lacks operational necessities such as seamless integrations and automation of simple tasks.

That leaves brokers with clunky, manual systems from the past that eat away at productivity and profit.

It's common for brokerages to focus more on lead generation programs, CRM software, and sophisticated websites as their revenue driving solutions. But if brokers ignore the backend, that's a missed opportunity to carve out additional profitability and claim a competitive advantage with a modern back office.

The usual suspects of the outdated back office

The symptoms of an outdated back office include 1) a lack of flexibility, 2) frustrating processes, and 3) wasted time on mundane tasks.

As a result of all these, brokers often suffer from issues like processing manual commission payments, lack of accounting system integrations, poor and slow agent onboarding processes, manual commission plan adjustments, just to name a few. These are straightforward tasks that should be simple but are not. And brokers don't have that kind of time to waste. They need to be nimble, spend time wisely, and have the flexibility to scale quickly.

Additionally, brokers don't realize how much old technology costs in cold, hard cash. Besides the obvious cost of additional human hours on manual and unnecessary work every month (which has add up to thousands of dollars per month), old systems need more maintenance, cause more downtime, take up servers, etc.

Running old tech costs you more money and is a drag on growth.

How do you free up those thousands of dollars as profit and drive more business?

These are the features you need in order to automate, streamline and turn your boring back office into revenue generating software:

Cloud-based. Automated. Integrated

These days, robust and scalable cloud architecture is a must. Newer, modern back office solutions provide simple and clean user interface available to your staff from anywhere, anytime you need it.

Automation is king. Your accounting software should automate mundane tasks like ACH direct deposit payments, agent billings, and commission plan management. Finally, robust and seamless integration into the other systems you use regularly is critical — look for full integrations into Quickbooks, Dotloop, SkySlope, Docusign, and fully integrated business platforms like kvCORE.

Transaction and commission flexibility

With teams on the rise and competitive models abounding, commission plans and models are no longer simple. Your back office software should know that and support your custom plans rather than dictate them. Platforms like Brokersumo give you simple ways to handle splits, caps, team plans, sharing, recruiting rules and so much more — and you can setup as many rules as you need.

Business intelligence

Having real-time access to your pipeline of commissions, agent performance, and lead conversion rates gives you actionable intelligence you can use to make smart decisions about your business. Your modern back office should leverage integrations with BI tools like Zoho Reports to give you real-time data, but allow you to adjust and customize your reporting and even automate delivery of that reporting to you.

Affordability

Modern tech with robust features like those above might sound daunting, expensive and hard to deploy. But modern back office systems are designed to make your life easier and cost half as much as older systems on the market.

Don't get stuck thinking it's too difficult or expensive to update your back-office. That old way of thinking is surely slowing down the growth of your business. Brokerages that have updated their core accounting and commission management systems are singing the praises and wished they'd done it sooner.

To view the original article, visit the Inside Real Estate blog.