Remember a few days ago when you were introduced to a salaried business model at Century 21 New Millennium in Alexandria, Virginia? One of the factors that helped make the firm successful was an internally designed business management platform that handled the common and conflicting details of multi-office salaried/independent contractor brokerage. Now New Millennium is creating a new company, GURU NETworks, Inc.,(GNI) to roll the broker-centric platform out to broker peers. The company has just merged systems with Synteleos, a transaction management solutions provider, bringing a complete brokerage and transaction management solution to the broker marketplace.

New Millennium principal and broker Ike Broaddus is GNI's CEO. He says the idea behind the new business model is to provide solutions for a continuum of broker needs no matter if they are small one-office brokers or large multi-office, multi-state brokers.

"We are converting our transaction management system into a desktop application - a web-based tool that integrates lead management, transaction, accounting and mortgage and title," explains Broaddus. "We are hoping to market it to every single real estate broker in the country."

The new company's flagship product is the GURU Broker Network (GURU), described as a comprehensive Web-based brokerage system, which provides full automation of the many steps involved in residential real estate brokerage. Guru is presented as a turnkey package customized to each broker’s locality and business model, including full transaction support for independent contractors and/or salaried agent business models (the foundation of New Millennium's brokerage services.)

Core broker functions integrated by GURU include a Web site, e-mail, lead generation, Multiple Listing Service(s), transaction management, accounting, and personnel which is designed to "greatly reduce data input and transaction management costs, while increasing lead optimization, agent and staff productivity, and quality customer service."

To criticisms that transaction management solutions have yet to be widely accepted or proven to save money, Broaddus counters, "They do save money. It has increased our revenues and saved us money. When we offer transaction service to agents we are able to implement a transaction fee to the customers, a $395 fee added on to the commission. The agents get a piece and the company gets a piece, and that more than pays for the cost of the system."

Where will Guru be different from other business management platforms? The product faces stiff competition from HomeAdvisor's already rolled-out Realty Desktop, which is integrated with MLS information management through its partnership with Interealty, an MLS information management system vendor. Homestore is also banking on brokers to get behind its comprehensive eRealtor business and transaction management platform which is partially ready, but still in development according to Dan Wool, Homestore spokesperson.

Broaddus believes his "I'm one of you" advantage will help Guru's launch. Says Broaddus, "We have the only product that is built from the brokers' perspective, built by a real estate company, used in a real estate company setting, not built by a think tank somewhere. We use it in real life."

Published: June 22, 2001

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