Adding an In-House Selling Broker

Hi Kevin,

Investigations are ongoing. As Tyler mentioned, there is not a straightforward solution and each scenario and brokerage is different. Thanks for checking back in on this and for your patience.

-Buck, VP of Product 

Our brokerage is new to skyslope and the subject behind this thread remains to be one of the biggest hiccups we have experienced in the platform. We have multiple offices within the firm, and many times our agents represent both the buyer and seller. Many of our agents do not feel comfortable allowing the agents on the other side to view the confidential listing agreement documents, but there seems to be currently no alternative to allow the buyer's agents to have access to the same skyslope file as the listing agents.

Has anything new come about since this thread was last addressed 4 months ago?

Thanks!

Kevin 

Thank you for addressing this at the Fireside Meeting today! 

It seems like one of the main issues is confidentiality between the two sides of the transaction. Here are some follow-up suggestions that might help keep data confidential between sides:

1. Would it be possible to have separate Documents Tabs for the Listing broker and the Selling broker, each broker only being able to access their side's tab? (This may also mean having 2 email addresses for the transaction to ensure forwarded emails/documents are going to the correct side's Documents Tab.) Both tabs should be visible to Admin. 

2. I think it is important for both agents to have access to the Checklist. The documents in the transaction Checklist are items related to this specific purchase between Buyer and Seller, which both sides would normally see. However, the Listing Documentation portion of the checklist should only be able to be seen/accessed by the Listing broker. It may also be necessary to have a Selling agent-only portion of the checklist for things like Buyer-Broker Agreements or financial information.

3. As far as the Commission Tab goes, it is important for both sides to be able to add data/notes regarding their commission in case there are referrals or broker concessions. Would it be possible for each side to only see their own commission and referral information, but allow the admin to see information from both sides? Or could this be achieved by creating two Commission Tabs similar to the Documents Tabs mentioned in item 1?

I'm sure this is all very complicated to achieve as far as the back-end goes, so I appreciate you working on it! 

Laura

Hi Everyone, this is something we are planning internally but we have a ways to go. To give you some insight, some of the challenges are making it easy for the sharing party to understand what documents they want to share with the agent on the other side. We can easily share them all, however most of the companies and agents we spoke to would not want ALL their documents shared. We also had some ideas of sharing the file but not documents, however sometimes there are commission details one agent may not want the other agent to see (i.e. they are giving X amount back for the closing cost to their client). We also discussed just sharing the checklist, however we found that after looking at several in-house transactions the buyer's agent file choose a different checklist then the seller's agents. There are also accounting integration mapping we have to consider here as well. Currently, we integrate all of the accounting platforms and we would have to reconfigure how we send that data as two sides when you would only see one side. As easy as this may sound; it affects several places of the application and the above examples are just some of what we have been discovering. 

We understand the problem we are trying to solve thanks to everyone's help and suggestions, we will need more time to work through all of the use cases to see what the best solution would be. At this point, this is the most I can share with everyone. I hope to have an update at our next planning session in 3 weeks. 

Let us know if you have any questions; we love hearing from our users. 

This would be wonderful! We are coming from a system that in-house (within our company, not just within our office) agents can share one file so that two duplicate files don't need to be done and then of course reviewed. I understand this could be an issue for the communication log so maybe if in this situation a second email address could be created for the selling side so that email address can be cc's on all correspondence. That would just eliminate the agents being able to see each others correspondence. This is one of the only complaints I'm getting from agents since we do quite a bit of in house transactions. 

Hi Tyler - Any updates on this request? This is the single biggest obstacle for our brokerage using SkySlope. It has INCREASED (doubled) the workload for everyone that has to touch a transaction in which our agents are on both sides. 

Also, could we add to where the agent on the other side whether in house or out of office the name is shown at the top of the page with the rest of the file details?? 

We would also like the ability to add one of our agents to each side and have only one transaction which both agents could view, BUT we would want to be able to limit the access to certain documents. In other words, we would only want each agent to have access to documents that are associated with their side.

I would find it helpful to give the (in-house) Selling Brokers access to the file on Skyslope.  There is no reason for them not to have access. As it stands right now, I end up entering them as a Listing Agent so that they can keep track of what is needed on the Checklist, be able to send and receive documents, logging messages etc.  I would NOT give access to a Selling Broker outside of our firm however.  

In my case, we would only need/want to be able to share with the brokers in our one office, however companies that have multiple locations may want to allow access to selling agents in several offices within that company. Perhaps this could be a setting for administrators to select which offices/brokers to allow sharing? 

Great follow up details, thanks for sharing. One last question: Would you expect this to only be within the same office, same company as in your company, or even other brokers in your area that also may be using SkySlope? I would assume you would not be sharing the checklist with the selling broker if not within your company? 

Hi - Tyler Smith, CEO of SkySlope here, I have a follow-up question for you. 

In this example, you would like to give the selling agent access to the transaction, are you referring to the checklist as well as the documents? Would you like for them to pull in the listing data to reduce data entry when the selling agent is creating the transaction? 

In this case is your goal to have ONLY the checklist items visible to the selling agent? 

Thanks for getting back to me.

The goal is to have one transaction with both listing and selling broker having access to the checklist and documents. I think there are two ways to handle it:

1. The responsibility of creating the transaction remains with the listing broker. It is their job to go to their listing and complete the "accept contract" process, then choose the cooperating in-house selling broker from a list like I suggested. 

2. When the selling broker selects a Skyslope-identified listing from the address search under "create transaction," automatically link it to the listing. This would not only auto-fill the data but also create the transaction from the listing (mimicking "accept contract" function).

An option where the selling broker only has access to the checklist would also work, but is less desirable.

I hope that helps,

Laura