How do You Scale Your Brokerage While Simplifying Compliance at the Same Time?

Carl SanFilippo, Owner of RE/MAX First Realty in New Jersey, discusses how dotloop helps his brokerage stay organized and close more deals without adding additional headcount.

1. How did you get started in real estate, and what is your role now?

 
I started in real estate 11 years ago as a 25-year-old agent, doing a lot of REO and foreclosure business. I bought an eight-agent RE/MAX franchise about five years ago, and all eight are still with me today. Currently, I have two offices and about 75 agents. My role is to help the office grow with recruiting and coaching.

2. How does dotloop help you grow and recruit?

 
What’s great about using dotloop is with two offices, we’re able to manage all of the files with one central location. I moved to a new location about a year ago, and I said to my admin team, “We’ve been on dotloop for eight months. When we move offices, I’m only taking one filing cabinet with us.” Last year, in my one office, we did about 1,000 transactions — and we only needed one filing cabinet. I’d have to rent a room just to store all of those files. Instead of having all of those files in that room, I can now use it for agents who produce revenue.

3. What were you doing before dotloop?

 
There are so many different solutions out there. The competitors were pitching me, “Hey, we have this, we have this, we have this…” and I wanted to wait and see who was the leader with paperless solutions. The one thing about having an office with 75 agents, you don’t want to make a lot of changes because there’s a lot of time involved with training and implementation, and we have about 96% of the agents using dotloop exclusively. We spend a lot of time and training onboarding the agents to show them it’s a valuable tool.

Quick story… I had the real estate commissioner in my office two weeks ago, and they asked me about a file. They asked, “Are you on dotloop?” I looked at the investigator and said, “Yeah, we’re on dotloop.” They said, “We love brokerages that are on dotloop!”

4. What have you experienced as a result of moving to dotloop?

 
It’s made our agents more productive, and it’s made our admin staff more streamlined where we were able to handle more business as an office without hiring more staff.

5. How has dotloop helped in other areas?

 
We keep all of the forms and documents that agents need in dotloop. We have an intranet we loop to dotloop. Agents used to ask where certain documents are, and now we just tell them, “It’s in dotloop.”

6. What would you tell another broker who’s considering investing in dotloop?

 
The best thing with dotloop is it saves us money. It’s a win-win. The agents like it once they get on board. We go through less paper and less printing. We’re able to do more deals in a systemized way. When submitting for review, it goes right to the admins for compliance. dotloop saves us so much time, money and energy.