Partner Success Story
Cisco Channel
Partner Helps Southern
California
Real Estate Firm Stay on Top
Shorewood Realtors is consistently ranked
as one of the top ten real estate firms in
Los Angeles County. In 1998 it appointed Mike Collins as its
general manager to direct
Shorewood’s explosive growth as a result of California’s
red-hot real estate market. Under
the direction of Collins and Lynn Edwards, the firms
CFO and director of technology,
Shorewood teamed up with Cisco Channel Partner Praxis
Computing and using the
Cisco local-area network (LAN) and wide-area network
(WAN) technology, created a
“virtual community,” linking agents at all
five Shorewood offices and those working
from home. The new system streamlines the distribution of information throughout
the agencies five offices, attracts the attention of
top real estate agents and clients, and
contributes significantly to the agency’s market-leading
position. Agency
Targets Inefficient Paper-based Operations Shorewood
has always been aggressive in pursuing listings and in closing sales—and
that
push made it number one in its market. But Collins knew being
content with the status
quo was not going to keep the agency number-one in Southern
California’s exploding real
estate market. He and Edwards wanted to disseminate
information more efficiently about
new listings to other Shorewood agents. Giving Shorewood
agents first crack at all of
the agency’s new listings before they reached a
multiple listing service would keep more
business ‘in house.’
While the company had built a solid
reputation with its expert agents specializing in
homes above the half-million dollar price point, many of its
operations could not keep
up with current information. For instance, its outdated
DOS-based database was merged
each day, but crashed often. Agents would enter search parameters to find a property
for
a client, and sometimes out-of-date listings had not
yet been purged. As a selling agent got
a new listing, they would prepare a paper document of
listing information and fax or send
it by courier to agents at the other Shorewood offices.
Sometimes a new listing would take
one to two weeks before it was featured on the company’s
Web site and even worse, in
some cases the property was already sold when it finally
did appear. “As
business grew, we were staffing up in the field offices to handle administrative
tasks,”
said Collins. In addition to the paper-based new listing information,
the industry and
related agencies have, over the years, required many
more files and pieces of paper to
conduct business. With the market booming, Collins decided
Shorewood could not stay
aggressive and competitive without either employing
new technology or adding many
more employees to deal with the paper.
