might run for agents, and the success (or lack thereof) of specific agents’ salesmanship, which the founders say provides additional value to both agents and brokerages over existing software programs.
“Here’s how you provide better service to your employees, make sure you get credit for it, and stay competitive,” Elmendorf says about the software.
Other similar services do exist, including Lone Wolf Technologies, a Canadian company that has a U.S. headquarters in Dallas. Lone Wolf lists similar reporting, accounting, and analytics services as a part of its software platform. Lone Wolf, which was founded 30 years ago, is partially owned by private equity firm Vista Equity Partners, which added a second round of investment in the company in 2016.
Like many other industries, technology such as Zillow and Redfin have dramatically shifted the real estate landscape—particularly compressing the margins that brokerages operate under, Kuper says. Redfin often offers users a 1 percent refund on their closing costs, which some brokerages have mimicked to compete. Services like Lone Wolf and Brokerage Engine are a response to that—a way to help those firms with slimming margins better track the finances and operations of their business.
Kuper argues that Brokerage Engine offers more services than Lone Wolf, specifically relating to the accounting of terms between an agent and the brokerage. And the four co-founders’ mixed backgrounds—having both technologists and real estate experts—also helps Brokerage Engine stand out, Elmendorf says.
“It’s not enough to have great technology,” Elmendorf says. “There’s a lot of great technology out there. It’s not enough to be able to scale. There are a lot of ways to scale. You have to be able to bring in actual business expertise and turn that into software.”
The co-founders only met after Kuper and Alston tried and failed to find someone who had built or would build the software they wanted for their brokerage. The pair decided to do it themselves, and became members at the downtown co-working space Geekdom, which has become a hotbed of new startups in San Antonio, to make connections.
Eventually, a mentor they met there—Nick Longo, a former Rackspace employee who actually co-founded Geekdom—suggested Alston and Kuper head to south San Antonio to meet the Elmendorf brothers, who develop software and some hardware products out of an old coffee factory.
The coffee factory is a story in and of itself, which Xconomy has previously covered. It’s an expansive 26,000-square-foot warehouse, where Brett Elmendorf works on various paid and personal projects, such as constructing desks, walls, and even homes—the latter was part of his early involvement with another San Antonio company called Rising Barn. (There’s a swimming pool made out of a shipping container outside, too.)
Whatever fortune or hard-nosed searching brought the co-founders together, Dirk Elmendorf says he believes this type of software-as-a-service project is the perfect company to be built in San Antonio, rather than in a larger tech city.
“The Valley is amazing for doing moon shot things that nobody’s seen before,” Dirk Elmendorf says. “But there are a whole lot of software businesses that aren’t that and can be tackled by good, technical people, working with good business people. That is the opportunity between the coasts.”
