BY – CRAIG C. ROWE – Inman
App helps agents, brokers reconnect fragmented internal processes for ‘real estate-specific project management’
Real estate process management
Trackxi is process experience software for real estate.
Top selling points:
- Buyer agreement integration
- BA-specific client associations
- Property management templates
- Smart task management
- Agent onboarding action templates
Top concern:
Trackxi’s realization about where it fits is a good sign of the product’s maturity, hopefully providing its founder a more solid marketing message to proliferate going forward. Adoption will remain a challenge until the company can staff up with account teams and dedicated sales teams. It’s close.
What you should know:
Trackxi’s maturation is the real update here. Defining a software product that rests on the edge of transaction management and a CRM is as hard for its creators as it is for the user to find a place for it.
But trust me when I say it slides into a niche you didn’t know you needed and emulates the value created by non-industry specific platforms like Trello. Asana and other tools meant to reduce operational clutter through clever organization of essential tasks, tight communication and automating the mundane.
The company’s well into its second year of operation and rests soundly on the vision of its founder, Portland, Oregon, broker Vijay Gopalswamy, who out of necessity needed to cut into the time he spent navigating a bloated inbox, among other superfluous business tasks. Off-the-shelf CRMs and document-based transaction systems were good but not centered on the best ways to make work less cumbersome.
Thus, users of Trackxi find themselves enmeshed in a real estate-specific software application designed to make it easier to run a real estate business. Its tools are customized to keep the agent in lockstep with what’s happening as what’s happening unfolds, reducing their need to send countless, disjointed messages, among other productivity hacks.
The company’s namesake operational maps interactive task-based visualizations can be customized to how a brokerage functions and in doing so, identify redundancies and productivity gaps as well as opportunities to combine and automate daily activities. Users know them as “templates” and they can be created for any number of in-house processes, from new contact follow-up and, as of this update, agent onboarding.
Trackxi’s latest improvements include new tracking mechanisms for brokers to keep track of buyer agreements, something Gopalswamy found out few brokers have a plan for. In other words, agents don’t know what to do with newly signed and required buyer agency and tour agreements. Common sense tells us they should be stored according to your respective state’s retention laws. Trackxi also associates each agreement with the client and its dates, auto-alerting users to their expiration and, for brokers, links every agent to their use of the now critical form.
There’s a new chat mechanism for teams to discuss certain documents, as well as task completion-based template creation and email series. For example, when a deal is marked as closed, the template for “post-close follow-up” will kick in.
Trackxi is also integrating property management templates, which help agents with a few properties under their operation or investor clients get a hold of the large number of items needed to ensure leases get signed, deposits collected and evictions carried out, among other essential duties of the rental property owner.
The app remains what I call a terrific solution for managing all the little things that hamper the progress between signature and closing. It’s not a clinical transaction manager, but more of an activity management solution, and it’s very good at it.
Communications are handled in-app and can include title and mortgage vendors, as well as clients, using permission-based views to ensure they’re not distracted by irrelevant business tasks.
The app displays an easily navigable snake graph, an interactive flowchart resembling a board game that is color-coded and task-based. It represents every milestone between contract and close; the details of each are summarized at each step, and revealed in more detail upon selection. Color indicates task status.
This is as simple a method as I can think of to communicate the state of a deal to your buyer or seller because they can be given access to see it. It’s a much better method than delaying an email response to them about a voicemail not being returned from your lender.
Every task created has a custom notes field, contact information for each party attached to it, and the ability to change its status, assign people to it and create due dates. Timelines are automatically created upon deal setup based on the closing date and will react to any changes an invited mortgage broker or bank lender inputs.
Deal flow within the app is rendered according to deal type, and the task templates are updated accordingly. Users can also sort according to close date to ensure priority for those deals most quickly approaching. Any user can modify and save any list, a nice touch for agents who sell in neighborhoods or condo communities with the same restrictive covenants, etc.
There’s the ability to gauge your outreach efforts to new leads via the Master Calendar by notifying the user of when next to reach out.
The intent is to let the buyer or seller’s interactions drive communication, giving agents an actual reason to reach out, a superior method than allowing records to fester under drawn-out drip campaigns. In addition to cutting down on unnecessary follow-up and superfluous email, a core tenet of the system, the CRM prioritizes clients by where they stand in their respective deals. Stages, or steps along the deal path, can be configured according to existing workflows if needed, and each step is connected to a string of reminders.
The CRM keeps users abreast of clients’ contribution of documents, as well, through its use of an external URL for pulling information directly from a secure web page into the Trackxi. Thus, it also categorizes and manages files according to customer and transaction. The CRM is deliberately designed to strengthen the relationship, not the number of times a marketing email is sent to them. The company’s vision is to get agents to work better, not more. Part of that is cutting down on marketing noise as a method to maintain relationships, and this is a great add-on to an already worthwhile set of tools.
The company also created a web app iteration of the product, meaning an improved user experience that eliminates the browser-based version’s need to access multiple tabs to work within different components of the software. Essentially, it works more now like a true, single piece of software, not needing to access multiple pages on a web server to deliver functionality. It should mean a generally faster response from the software. Trackxi is aiming for the everyday agent, and in doing so, might make it difficult to grow quickly. Teams and brokerages can use Trackxi, too. The pricing structures make it ideal for scaling over time.
