There's a Transaction Revolution Going On

By Jim Gillespie, July 2004
Excertped from the Advanced Real Estate Supersales Newsletter.

Jim Gillespie, Ph.D.
, is America's Premier Real Estate Coach®. He specializes in real estate training, seminars, and one-on-one coaching for agents and management. Visit his web site for over 200 free training articles, live audio interviews with top-producing agents, and Jim's FREE 7-day online agent training course.


There's a revolution in progress in our industry. It began on the residential side of the business a few years ago, and it's now beginning to find it's way into the commercial side of the business as well. I'm talking about the revolution of using transaction platform software for your real estate sales transactions.

Your time as a real estate agent is extremely valuable. And your time is best spent both on the telephone and in face-to-face situations with clients and prospects negotiating transactions and developing new business. But once you've successfully negotiated a sale, getting caught up in the follow-up of closing the transaction can really cut into the time you could be utilizing instead to successfully develop new business. That's where transaction platform software comes in.

Transaction platform software allows you to do all the follow-up on your sales transactions through a Web-based software program. On the residential side of the business, SettlementRoom (www.settlementroom.com) is generally looked upon as the leader in this technology. What this technology allows you to do is have all of the parties to a transaction login to the Web site, view all the relevant documentation, know what the next step is they need to complete to move the transaction forward, and get notified by E-mail whenever progress has been made on the transaction.

For example, on any given sale transaction you would have a buyer and seller along with their respective agents logging into the system for transaction follow-up. In addition, you might have an escrow company, a lender, a title insurance company, and the attorneys for both parties logging into the system also. Each party would be notified by the system about what they need to do on their end to move the transaction forward to the next level. E-mail messages could also be sent along with "CC" copies to any parties involved in the transaction, and the system itself would keep records of all communications between the parties throughout the transaction, too.

As an agent, this represents a huge improvement in your life. You now have more free time as the parties to the transaction know where to go to find out the status of the transaction at any moment in time. They also know what they need to do at each moment throughout the transaction, too. This saves you a ton of phone calls from people continually asking you what's going on and what needs to be done. And this translates into more time for you to develop new business, and more time for you to generate more income for yourself.

Jim Gillespie is America's Premier Real Estate Coach®. He specializes in real estate training, seminars, and one-on-one coaching for agents and
management. Visit his Web site at http://www.RealEstateSalesCoach.com
for over 200 free training articles, live audio interviews with top-producing agents, and Jim's FREE 7-day online agent training course.