Remember buying your first house? The excitement of finding the perfect place, in the perfect neighborhood, at a great price. Now, remember signing all those papers after a tiresome buying process. How did you feel then? Excited or relieved?
If you’re like most, the excitement of buying a house ended long before you actually crossed the last T’s and dotted those last i’s. And a local entrepreneur and former realtor thinks that’s just wrong and unnecessary.
“It should be one of the most exciting experiences for a home owner, but instead it’s usually the exact opposite,” said Austin Allison, a University of Cincinnati grad and president and CEO of DotLoop.com, formerly MLS Contracts.
That’s among the reasons Allison and partner Matt Vorst, a tech expert, created an innovative new software product DotLoop.com. It’s an online, collaborative transaction environment serving the real estate industry, including brokers, Realtors, buyers and sellers. Among its features is utilizing electronic signatures and storing and making easily available documents in a secure space.
“There are verbal offers. There are faxed-in offers. If an agent is ‘doing things right,’ according to the old system, they’re writing in the margins of contracts, crossing things out and initialing them, then faxing them again," Allison said.
Allison said the system doesn’t eliminate the in-person, relationship factor of selling and buying real estate, but makes those in-person meetings you don’t want to have, like the slow offer/counter offer process, more efficient.
“The way things have always been done just isn’t practical any more. What the system needed was somebody to automate the process, not necessarily change it,” Allison says.
DotLoop.com’s offices are in Blue Ash and employ about 20 people, mostly in the technical arena. Allison said the company is looking to add to its workforce soon.
DotLoop.com is currently in Beta but will be unveiled in November at the National Association of Realtors Convention in San Diego. It should be on the market by December, Allison said.
Writer: Feoshia Henderson
Source: Austin Allison, president and CEO of DotLoop.com Andy Hemmer, president of AndyHemmer.com PR/Writing Services
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