Keller Williams Realty

KWRI is America’s sixth largest real estate firm with over 24,000 agents in the U.S and Canada. Founded in 1983, the company has more than 300 offices in 41 states and provinces.

KWRI treats its 24,000-plus franchises and associates as partners, and shares its knowledge, policy control, and company profits on a system-wide basis.

KWRI needed a way to communicate and collaborate more efficiently than through traditional phone and fax methods. The goal was to improve overall business productivity and communication for every KWRI market center in a cost-effective and timely manner.

The company explored the option of building its own in-house online solution, but quickly realized that was too time consuming and costly.

KWRI adopted WebOffice. The Web-based solution allows KWRI headquarters to share critical business information instantly with individual market centers and provides KWRI agents with a new way to collaborate and improve productivity.

"We initially considered building a collaboration forum in-house, but we quickly realized a hosted solution like WebOffice’s offered all of the functionality we needed at a much more reasonable price. We’re saving more than $500,000 per year with WebOffice and that’s not including the constant administration costs involved with building and maintaining a home-grown solution."

- Jack Miller, IT Manager, Keller Williams Realty International (KWRI)

KWRI agents can now take advantage of a complete suite of applications to help them work faster and more efficiently.

“Each of our market centers now has its own secure online meeting place where agents in that office can access the latest corporate news, share schedules, manage documents and collaborate in real-time,” said Jack Miller, IT Manager at KWRI.

“We initially considered building a collaboration forum in-house, but we quickly realized a hosted solution like WebOffice’s offered all of the functionality we needed at a much more reasonable price. We’re saving more than $500,000 per year with WebOffice and that’s not including the constant administration costs involved with building and maintaining a home-grown solution.”

KWRI rolled out the service to its market centers in a matter of weeks and immediately customized it to match its own corporate look and feel.

Also, additional customization provided by WebOffice has enabled KWRI to display region-specific information about special KWRI seminars, activities and events on only the appropriate market center WebOffices.

The firm realized additional benefits, when the new WebOffice technology attracted new agents who preferred digital business practices, to the old, cumbersome paper-based practices. Now, KWRI agents can manage paperwork more easily in the WebOffice Document Manager.

With WebOffice, KWRI’s agents have been able to easily leverage data from a variety of desktop tools. Data from applications, like Microsoft Access or Excel, can be readily imported into the WebOffice Database Manager. Once the data is there, it can be shared on the Web and WebOffice users can create their own data views and reports.

The busy realtors also appreciate the WebOffice Contact Manager and the Online Calendar that sync with Microsoft Outlook or hand-held Palm devices.