Today we have a guest post from one of our customers, Kevin Lisota, Chief Executive Officer, findwell. Learn how he is differentiating his company from their competition with Office 365. You can read more guest posts from customers here.

My real estate company, findwell, isn’t your normal real estate agency. I started the company in 2008 when I grew frustrated by the high commissions and low quality of service that I found with some traditional real estate agencies. I initially got a real estate license to help with some real estate investments and development projects that I was involved with on the side, but enough friends and co-workers started asking me for help with their real estate transactions that I decided to start findwell. I realized that technology had changed the economics of the real estate business and by hiring the right people and making smart use of technology, our company could provide full-service real estate brokerage at dramatically lower prices.

I have a background in technology, so it’s not surprising that I’d use it to differentiate findwell from our competitors. That said, we don’t have any official IT staff person—we’ve got a contract developer who helps with our website, but I take care of all the company’s IT needs. Of course, the time that I spend backing up our email system or upgrading our server is time that I’m not seeking out new home buyers and sellers, which is the most important aspect of my job and it is what pays the bills.

The most important thing for findwell agents is being accessible to our clients at all times and places. We have five full-time agents, including myself and our marketing director. All of us are constantly on the move—we need to show homes, visit listings, meet with prospective clients, sign contracts, and take care of all the other aspects of buying and selling homes. Fast response is critical; without it, we might lose out on a new client, which could represent thousands of dollars of revenue.

Email is the backbone of our business. We use it for everything and can’t afford even a small outage because our clients count on being able to reach us. When a great home comes on the market, sometimes the difference between getting the house and losing out is a matter of hours, so instant communication is essential. Until recently, we ran a server in our office to manage email and document-sharing. It’s worked well for us, and we’ve also been pretty lucky: I’m not very consistent about backup, recovery, or proactive hardware, so a catastrophic IT failure would be, well, catastrophic for us. I’m sure I could eventually reconstruct our systems and data, but it wouldn’t be easy.

What I’ve been looking for is a way to get the same IT (or greater) functionality that we’ve had, but without the management and maintenance responsibilities, and I’ve found it. We’ve been testing Microsoft Office 365, which is a suite of online tools that offers email messaging with Microsoft Exchange Online and document sharing with Microsoft SharePoint Online, along with other capabilities that I’m excited about, like web conferencing through Microsoft Lync Online. Our users are familiar with Microsoft software, and I find that we can minimize our training by sticking with tools that they know. Our transition to Office 365 was pretty seamless, and most users didn’t even realize that their email and our team site were now being hosted on servers run by Microsoft.

Microsoft Lync Online provides some interesting new communication capabilities for us. Normally, we interact with our clients in person, on the phone, or over email. For complex discussions like contract negotiations or market valuations, phone calls and lengthy emails are not always a great way to have a discussion and in-person meetings are a common result. Lync Online allows us to host online meetings and share complex documents and data quickly and easily without having to travel. If my agents can spend less time in the field, they can help more clients and ultimately close more deals.

Probably the best part for me about using Office 365 is that Microsoft takes care of IT management.

I can spend more time building the business and working on IT projects that will actually help our bottom line, like improving our public website or contributing on our blog. Plus, I don’t have to worry about adding server capacity as we grow. I want to hire more agents as the real estate market recovers from its recent downturn, and I also want to expand geographically. Thanks to the Office 365 subscription model, whenever we bring on a new employee, I can just add another license for $6 each month, with no worries about our IT infrastructure supporting the additional load. All in all, with Office 365, we get the same IT systems that are used by large companies at an affordable small-business price.

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