Michael Wystrach

Michael Wystrach is the CEO of WysLife. He loves all things, ok well almost all things related to, real estate, technology, gadgets and numbers. He is quite possibly one of the worst spellers and his grammar is horrible. Please feel free to point out errors, he has thick skin.

Ok well it took me a few days to get to this but here is part two. Some tools you can use to maximize your utilization rate.

According to an Inman survey of Agents making over $100K the #1 thing they waste their time on is doing paperwork

In order to maximize utilization as an agent you have to lower the amount of time you spend on paperwork. Here are the top 5 tools to help you do that.

WysLoop – Well you knew we were going to say that. But organizing your documents, emails, and contacts automatically by transaction, in one place will save you a ton of time. Also this is the only one on the list that is free. The fact that it is free, easy to use and will make your life a lot easier gets it a #1 spot on our list. Of course it helps that we are the makers.
EFax – If you don’t have this you are light years behind. You have to go digital and this will help a lot. You can get an efax from a number of different providers. EFax , MyFax, Smartfax or any other million of providers. You can get a line for as little as $3.99 a month. Trust me it is worth it. Make sure that the fax provider sends the faxes to you in PDF.
E-Signature – Again a no brainer. This will save you so much time. It gets rid of faxing or physically delivering documents. You need to make sure your state lets you do E-Signatures and some lenders will not let you use E-Signatures on some documents. I promise this will be worth every penny. The big players in the market are DocuSign, EchoSign, and RightSignature. DocuSign has made the biggest push with Realtors and the different associations. I have used EchoSign and I really like it. They give you 5 free documents a month so if you aren’t doing a lot of deals that may be a great option. All of them are around $15 a month and it is well worth the money. If you value your time at $10 an hour (Hopefully you are way higher) than this is one document you have to take to someone’s house
iPhone, iPad and Laptop – If you really want to be a successful agent you need all three of these. Here is why; You should not be in the office you should be out and about, but that does not mean you should not be doing your paperwork. With the other tools, 1-3, you should be able to do everything on the road. I did not put Andriod on this not because it isn’t a good phone but because it is not nearly as easy. Chances are if you aren’t using these tools already you are not very tech. savvy so you need something that you can figure out quickly and have it work. The iPhone does that. Here is what you will use all three for

iPhone – Emails, Phone Calls, accessing WysLoop, taking pictures, writing notes and more.
iPad – Reviewing documents, creating forms, collecting signatures on documents, accessing WysLoop and more.
Laptop – Bigger jobs like, filling big forms, writing long messages on WysLoop, uploading documents on WysLoop, creating transactions on WysLoop and more. You see the trend, lots of WysLoop

4G Mifi – Final thing makes sense. Now that you are fully digital and have all the tools you need to stay connected. Rather than getting all your devices hooked up simply get a MiFi device which allows you to create your own wireless network. This way all your devises always have the internet. You can get one at any carrier, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T Mobile. The monthly bills range from $20 ish to $60 a month.

Those are my tips. Here is what your monthly bill will be:

1.) WysLoop - Free

2.) Efax – $4 – $10

3.) E-Sign $15 – $25

4.) iphone, ipad, laptop (A lot up front)

5.) Mifi $40 – $60

Monthly Total $60 – $100 give or take. Trust me it will be the best $60 you spend all month.

As always please post comments or questions. And feel free to correct my spelling or grammar!

January 19, 2012
Posted by Michael Wystrach
1,687 Responses

To me utilization is at the heart of capitalism. It all comes down to how effectively we use assets. There are all sorts of terms for this, ROI, bang for the buck, work smarter not harder and a million more. At the end of the day it comes down to maximizing utilization. In a Real Estate Agent’s case the number one asset they have is themselves. And the number one thing they need to look at is the utilization of their time. Are they getting the highest Return on Time, (ROT)? A quick heads, up this can be a little tricky, maximizing utilization or ROT is not as simple as it seems. What do I mean by that? Lets look at two simple ROT examples.

Agent 1

Goes to a long 3 hour lunch with her insurance agent. They talk about their kids, the economy, the insurance market, and of course the housing market.

Agent 2

Spends her three-hour lunch filing documents, and emails. Fielding calls from her clients asking her to explain what is a Preliminary Title. Making 10 calls between sellers agent, the inspector and her clients to set up an inspection. And of course faxing, emails and more calls.

Pretty easy right? Looks like Agent 2 is a hustler and Agent 1 is a lazy SOB. Well lets play this out a little further.

Agent 1

In the next 3 months her Insurance Agent gives her two referrals for listings for a $500,000 home and a $600,000 home. She ends up signing up both clients and in a little less than 120 days after her lunch she has made $33,000.

Agent 2

She gets all her paperwork filed, finally got the inspection completed and eventually closed the transaction.

So it was a win win for both parties but Agent 1 turned her 3 hours into $33,000 of new business and Agent 2 brought in no new business. Now who is doing a better job of time utilization?

The bottom line and what good agents know, is that this is a selling business. And great agents maximize their time towards selling, which they know will give them the best ROT. Great Agents are always selling themselves, selling houses, selling their buyers on the perfect home, selling other agents on why their offer is the best and selling anyone they know or meet on why they need to refer them business. Any time not selling is wasted time! Yes they need to make sure the other stuff gets done and yes that takes time but it is the great agents who get that other stuff done quicker and smarter.

At this point 90% of you are saying those agents have a team or an assistant. If I had that I would be able to go to 3 hour lunches but it is just me so that is not realistic. You may hate me but I’m going to tell you something you won’t like. That is not true! We live in an age where working smarter has never been easier.

WARNING! Here comes the sales pitch, but follow me I think you will see it makes a lot of sense. WysLoop is not a magic software that will make all your troubles go away but what it will do is save you 5 minutes here, 10 minutes here and an hour there. And over the course of a transaction you will find that you have literally saved days when you add up all the time and over the course of a year you will find you have saved weeks. That is time that can be spent selling or as some people like to say marketing, like going to lunches, events, meeting old clients for drinks or anything else.

So how do we give you days and weeks of free time to sell?

1.) WysLoop educates everyone in the transaction especially the buyers and sellers. Our checklist not only immediately and effortlessly informs everyone in the transaction the current state of the transaction, but it also educates our users clients on the process of buying or selling a home and the steps involved. This alone will save an agent hours and with some clients days. With a detailed list with due days and smart links, important information is instantly available to everyone in the transaction. Which equals less phone calls, texts, emails and faxes. 2 mins, 20 secs, 5 mins, 10 mins. It starts adding up.

2.) One simple communication platform. Create events, share documents, messages, contact information and chat on our transaction forum. Using one common platform for these task will save you more time than you will imagine. Especially when you get to the next step. Finding that email, that document, inputting that event and your clients contact information all takes time. Again that time starts adding up quickly.

3.) Auto organization makes life so easy. Because everything you do in the system is linked to a transaction and because our system is awesome ,when a transaction is closed or canceled everything is automatically organized, filed and stored. And this is for everyone, including your clients. Imagine hitting one button and having all your emails organized, you contacts sorted, your documents filed, your events saved, and your checklist stored with timestamps. Actually don’t imagine, start doing. It really is that easy.

Oh yeah and the ROI on this is huge, because it is free. That means every minute you save from our system was given to you for free, just from working smarter.

In part 2 I will examine what other tools you can use to maximize your utilization. And give you some other examples of how WysLoop will save you time, a ton of it.

Please post any questions, comments, disagreements or as always spelling and grammar errors. :) sorry

Well after over a year of development we are up and running. We are currently optimized for Arizona transactions, but we will be coming to your state soon. In fact if you are not from AZ, send us an email on our Contact Us page and let us know where you are and we will notify you when we are in your state.

So a little about WysLife, what we are today and what we will be in the future. First and foremost WysLife takes a very different view on residential real estate than most other real estate software companies. We look at the life cycle of a house, who is going to be involved with a house during that life cycle and how we can make everyone’s life a little easier, or to steal a line from Staples, create an easy button. How do we do this? We provide the EASIEST platform to share information (Documents, events, contacts and messages) on a house, then we automatically organize and share that information for easy retrieval. Upload a document, share it with others and that document will be automatically stored and organized for them. Why have two or ten people file the same document? With WysLife, do it once and it is done for everyone. And rather than creating different software for realtors, escrow officers, loan officers, buyers, sellers, appraisers, inspectors, and vendors, we build one platform for everyone to work together which can be accessed through a different portal depending on the type of users.

You see we understand that different users have different goals in dealing with a house. A buyer wants to organize all their home information, vendor contacts, maintenance events, warranties, blueprints and so on. And an Agent wants to focus on completing the transaction, the important dates of the transaction, the broker files, messages and all their contact information. So we built each one of our portals WysLoop, WysHome & WysVendor, to meet each specific user’s goals but at the same time allowing them to seamlessly share information with each other. So at the end of the transaction every document that the Agent, Escrow Officer, and Loan Officer shared with the buyer will be neatly stored and organized for the buyer. If it is 6 days after the transaction or 6 years after the transaction the buyer and seller will keep able to immediately access those documents or their agents, escrow officers, loan officers contact information from anywhere in the world. Integration and seamless, easy sharing is the trick to a great software. And that is what we building a great software. And we do this for Free!

In the very near future we will start offering competitive bids on home services for our home buyers. These no cost, no obligation bids will be provided to the buyers to help them get the best deals possible on the home services they need for their new home. From homeowners insurance to landscaping we will help take the hassle out of getting multiple bids. Our unique process gets rid of applications, multiple forms, or visiting multiple websites. We do all the work for you. Yes no Forms or Applications!!!! If you already have someone, not a problem our competitive bids will make sure your provider is giving you a great deal. And if you don’t want us to get you bids, you can opt out. Again we make this as easy as possible. We are working with our vendors so that we can truly make this process as easy as possible for the homebuyers.

For example with our preferred insurance vendors home buyer will get multiple quotes for homeowners insurance for their new home. If the home buyer likes one of the quotes they can select that quote and we will directly upload their invoice for their Escrow Officer, (so they can pay it through escrow or impounds) upload their insurance policy and automatically store their insurance providers contact information. All with one simple click! If they every want to look at their policy, contact their representative they can quickly access it from anywhere in the world.

I will continue to add more post about the future of WysLife and new features.

We are excited to be offering our product, free of charge to Real Estate Agents, Escrow Officers, Loan Officers, Buyers and Sellers.

January 12, 2012
Posted by Michael Wystrach
2,789 Responses

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