Client – StepStone Realty
StepStone Realty has built a successful business around creative real estate. They provide a number of services to help their investor agents close deals more effectively, from short sale processing to mentoring to training. StepStone prides itself on the flexibility it can offer to its agents, compared to more traditional real estate firms.
Problem
If you have ever bought or sold a house, you know the paperwork is an absolute nightmare. You are presented with a contract several inches thick, requiring signature and initials in numerous places, and signatures must be collected from several different parties: buyer, seller, buyer’s agent, seller’s agent, lender, title company, etc. DotLoop provides an online SaaS product, which streamlines this process, and handles various compliance issues related to the transaction.
Because this product solves so many problems, StepStone started offering it to all their agents, to help process their real estate transactions. However, StepStone relies on a custom-built back office system to manage clients, agents, deals, and commissions. Since that system is custom-built, there was obviously no pre-existing integration from DotLoop, which StepStone could use to exchange data.
Because DotLoop handles so many facets of the transaction, and StepStone’s custom-built solution is integral to their operations, there was a great deal of data to exchange between the two systems, which all had to be done by manual copy and paste. This is time-consuming and error-prone. And when you are talking about a system that handles legally binding contracts for 6- and 7-figure transactions and another system that handles all the financials for the business, errors are not acceptable.
Solution
We built an integration in PHP which bolted on to StepStone’s existing LAMP stack back-office system. The integration provided a library that wrapped DotLoop’s REST API in easy-to-use classes and methods and streamlined the multi-step OAuth-based token authentication. This allowed them to send agent and deal data from their back-office solution to DotLoop.
The integration also allowed them to import transaction and contract data from DotLoop into StepStone’s systems, and check on the status of pending deals with a scheduled job.
Result
With this integration in place, they were able to eliminate manual copying of data between DotLoop and their back-office system, removing a point of failure, and preventing potentially costly mistakes. They were also able to increase productivity for each member of their small administrative staff, keeping overhead low.