How a single person in eXp manages more than 400 real estate agents' contracts

Meet eXp Spain

eXp is one of the world’s fastest-growing real estate brokerages. Founded in the United States in 2009 with presence in 23 countries and more than 86,000 real estate professionals, all connected through a unique cloud-based platform, eXp World.

eXp’s business model is based on community and technology. From its global platform and with the support of national teams, it offers real estate agents access to market-leading technology and tools. They also combine training and mentorship they need to carry out their business activities competitively.

We spoke with Renata Sujto, Managing Director, who launched eXp Spain in May 2021 with Elísabet Ochoa, Lawyer & Transaction Specialist, in charge of providing legal support.

The challenge: Deliver digitized scalable legal service to real estate agents

eXp's goal is clear — to provide a comprehensive service to make sure their agents are at the top of the marketplace.

"eXp wants to offer agents everything they need to obtain maximum efficiency in their real estate transactions. Allowing them to obtain a higher turnover margin and the possibility to assist more clients. Therefore, end up closing more transactions at the end of the year." –  Renata Sujto, Managing Director.

How? eXp is a technology-driven real estate company that has replaced brick-and-mortar offices with its cloud-based platform. It offers automated processes, and agents can even interact in the metaverse platform, revolutionizing the traditional real estate industry.

But was everything really automated? No. Each country has different legislations regarding real estate transactions, which must be reflected in all the paperwork and contracts.

To this end, when eXp started operating in Spain, Renata and Elísabet set up a Google Drive with templates of the legal documents that agents could download and change with the necessary data.

The edited documents were then uploaded back to Google Drive or mailed to the legal team for eXp's review and approval. This review was key but also lengthy and manual since eXp had to review each document. The contracts needed checking for changes to the substantive terms and conditions, including possible errors.

"This was messy and time-consuming, there were a lot of errors, and it took forever. It was a large, manual workload of little value, and super inefficient." –  Renata Sujto, Managing Director.

If the agent had any queries, special requests from the client, or comments from the eXp lawyer Elisabeth, endless email chains were generated. At that time, there were less than 50 agents. It was already impossible for one person to manage.

In addition, eXp could have been compromised by any errors in legal documents.

"I, as Managing Director, was losing sleep, thinking that no matter how many hours we put in, we could miss any errors." –  Renata Sujto, Managing Director.

Agents also felt the impact of waiting days for reviews to be responded to. They could not afford that. In a highly competitive market such as real estate where time is critical.

In addition, they were spending hours away from the commercial activity to keep on top of paperwork. eXp estimates that real estate agents had to spend 50% of their time on administrative low-value tasks for their clients, resulting in agents' commission reduced by 40% to 70%.

The solution: An end-to-end contract automation solution

Renata was on a mission to find an innovative tool that would facilitate eXp's legal operations while giving the real estate agents autonomy and efficiency.

She found several electronic signature platforms, but they were only partial solutions. They digitized the signature of each document, but were not flexible enough to allow internal collaboration between real estate agents and the eXp’s legal team.

She needed an end-to-end contract automation solution. The only one that met all requirements was Parallel, as it had these features all in one place:

• a form in which agents could easily fill in information about their client and property,
• automatic generation of contracts based on this information, plus
• integrated digital signature providers.

It was the perfect solution.

Also, Parallel gave her peace of mind as agents could only input some data without modifying the default contract template.

With Parallel's support, Elísabet quickly set up templates, ensuring that they could be adapted to all the variations of the agreements. Once the most common contracts were incorporated, a couple of training sessions were organized with the real estate agents, and in a short time, they started using it.

"In the beginning, there was some fear regarding real estate agents using Parallel since they had varied technological backgrounds. However, once they started, they quickly told me how convenient it was for them to be able to be with the client, take out the tablet at any time, select the template, complete the information, and send it to sign. All in 5 minutes. Allowing them to offer an efficient and distinguished service to the client.” — Elísabet Ochoa, Lawyer & Transaction Specialist.

In addition, thanks to this implementation, each agent now had their own control panel with all their legal documents —shared with eXP's legal team— facilitating real-time collaboration without emails (if any questions arose).

The benefits: Lower operating costs, better services for real estate agents and their clients

From then on, executing any contract streamlined the process for eXp, the agent, and even the client!

As Renata summarized well, thanks to Parallel, eXp benefits from the following:

• More internal coordination — eXp’s legal team and the agents are always in the same page, they are coordinated in real time so that doubts and approvals are solved in no time. Also, agents no longer have the contract templates in a separate place, reviewed versions in another, queries in emails and e-signatures in another platform. Now, everything is centralized in one place.
• More empowered agents — Since they no longer depend on the reviews and approvals of eXp’s legal team. Now, agents can easily choose a template, enter the information, and launch it to sign, hassle free and without delays.
• ‍More legal certainty and fewer mistakes — eXp has the certainty that the legal documents executed by real estate agents are accurate, compliant, and free from risky errors without having to review contracts manually.
• ‍Lower costs for both eXp and the agents — On the one hand, with the number of agents and real estate transactions it currently has, eXp would need an entire legal team of at least 6 or 7 people.

“Thanks to Parallel, one person handles all the paperwork for real estate transactions for more than 400 agents.” –  Renata Sujto, Managing Director.

But with Parallel, only one person is needed — saving eXp approximately €280,000 per year.

On the other hand, agents significantly reduced the time spent on paperwork tasks which clients do not perceive added value. This has positively impacted on their commission margin.

“Before Parallel, I spent 30% of my time managing contracts and paperwork. Now, I only dedicate 5% of my time to this type of task, leaving me more time to focus on providing clients with great service.” – Pablo Getino, Real estate agent associated to eXp Spain.

Thanks to Parallel's contribution, eXp has become a more scalable, cost-efficient real estate agent network. This allows the provision of better services for agents and clients alike!