Comprised of real estate experts, United Mortgage of Florida connects prospective homebuyers with top-notch brokers. Providing alternatives to big banks requires a comprehensive system with the ability to automate messages to customers and track information across workbooks. Here’s how Spreadsheet.com has simplified many of United Mortgage of Florida’s workflows.
Originally from Cuba, Romy now calls Florida home. Before he started his own real estate and mortgage companies, Romy worked in retail. However, when he learned about the potential of real estate, he decided to switch focus. In 2005, he launched International Realty Group, where he uses his skills as a communicator to his advantage. The husband and father followed that up by launching United Mortgage of Florida in 2019. With a degree in Information Technology, Romy has a clear vision for how his team should store, send, and retrieve information.
United Mortgage of Florida has a team of 20 loan officers. Because the business has a large amount of customer-loan officer communication, United Mortgage of Florida requires tools that can automate as much of this as possible. Romy and his team cycled through several products and workflow management platforms in the past but found little success.
“We are a relatively small operation. Because of that, we rely on technology to help us automate manual tasks. We have to be efficient,” he says. “We used Smartsheet in the past, but they required us to upgrade to an enterprise account in order to use their dynamic views features. The setup for this Smartsheet feature—which comes standard on Spreadsheet.com—came at a cost of thousands of dollars.”
Another issue Romy encountered with Smartsheet was a lack of timely support. Whenever he’d reach out for help, he couldn’t get an answer fast enough. And when he did receive an answer, it wasn’t very useful.
“The response was, ‘We’re working on it,” he adds. “But by then, I had already migrated to Spreadsheet.com because I couldn’t wait that long. Nobody can wait that long. The lack of support was challenging. So was their lack of filtered data in a way that would allow me to have access to certain data across different sheets. They didn’t have the data relationships that Spreadsheet.com offers. This meant a lot of copy-pasting with a ton of manual maintenance between multiple sheets.”
As Romy’s real estate business expanded and he launched United Mortgage of Florida, he made a decision to move his entire operation to Spreadsheet.com.
“My team and I were already very familiar with the flexibility and calculation power of spreadsheets and the record-based structure of a relational database,” he says. “When I saw that I was able to implement database-style relationships between rows in different worksheets without writing brittle, complex formulas, I jumped on it. It’s what my company needed.”
Romy was also searching for a platform that could provide his company with prompt customer support. “I wasn’t getting the level of support that I needed with Smartsheet,” he says. “The amazing thing about Spreadsheet.com, outside of the features, is the level of customer support.”
Romy also credits Spreadsheet.com with listening to customers. Since adopting the product he has offered several feature suggestions, some of which he has already seen developed and released.
Spreadsheet.com has allowed United Mortgage of Florida to become more efficient with its built-in Automations. “We needed to build a workspace that has the data presented in a clear way and our customers want to get updates immediately. Our loan officers and borrowers must be notified of any change that happens in any given transaction, right away. With Spreadsheet.com we built a system where everybody gets notified of any changes during the loan application process.”
Romy has embraced Spreadsheet.com Automations and is now a power user, with a large number of custom workflows where certain clients automatically receive text messages with time-sensitive materials.
“My clients are getting twenty-six messages in fifty-two days,” he says. “If you look at my Spreadsheet.com automations — it has the full sequencing set up. The first message goes out, then it changes to the next, which is a text message, and so forth. Basically, Spreadsheet.com allows me to automatically send a large number of customized messages every two days. It’s saving me and my loan officers so much time simply because we don’t have to manually text all of our customers.”
With related rows, you can link rows across worksheets like a relational database, even rows in different workbooks. When dealing with as much sensitive financial information as United Mortgage of Florida has, this is a must-have feature.
“The ability to access related data from different worksheets and workbooks using Spreadsheet.com's Related Rows is my favorite feature of the platform,” Romy says. “Every loan transaction has its own worksheet. There is also a transaction log that documents all transactions. That’s a different level of data. For example, I can go into a loan record and see what documents a customer has provided, what documents they still need to provide, and what other steps they need to clear. If I need to find any other data that is remotely related to a customer's loan process, I can click on the transaction record and view it. Even if it's not in the same sheet, but connected to the transaction log, I'm able to drill down to the data I need quickly and easily.”
While most of the time Romy works in Spreadsheet.com using a browser, sometimes he needs to print or export the data in his spreadsheets to PDF files.
“I love these features too,” he says. “They save so much time, and it takes just a few seconds. I have a worksheet that allows me to create an invoice by typing in a transaction number. All of the data populates automatically and then I can simply print it or export it to PDF and send it to the customer.”
“It’s impossible to talk about my business without talking about Spreadsheet.com. I think it is an amazing solution and for us has scaled well our usage has grown. It should make the life of any small- and middle-sized business owner 100% better. Spreadsheet.com is the single best tool right now on the market for businesses to organize their data and automate transactions without sacrificing the power and flexibility of traditional spreadsheets. In short, Spreadsheet.com allows you to become a hero of your business data and workflows."
