How a digital real estate firm uses a smart workplace to stay agile

Exporo is a free and easy-to-use online marketplace that allows private investors to make any-size investments in real estate projects. Before they started their platform, real estate companies relied on banks for loans or big-money investors to get their projects off the ground. Today, Exporo has grown to have more than 200 employees worldwide.

Planning for rapid growth, Exporo built a digital business model with agile digital workflows that will scale with the company. They believe that businesses that want to react quickly and flexibly have to set up their processes accordingly. That's why a flexible working model, asynchronous hours, and trust in their team members are part of the company's fundamental values—their team's work is more important than where or how it gets done. Exporo uses Dropbox's cloud-based collaboration tools to bring together all the stakeholders and ensure the company's success.

Linking all internal and external stakeholders on a single platform

Since Exporo has team members and third-party partners around the globe, they need a way to communicate and create from a distance. Dropbox allows seamless collaboration among their internal team members and external partners alike. Shared folders enable employees to set up places where they can organize the elements of their daily work. Then, with Paper, they can work intuitively on a wide range of tasks—from a quick sketch to in-depth project plans. In addition, it allows team members to come together in real-time or asynchronously to collaborate on interactive documents.

Using Dropbox has enabled the Exporo team to avoid typical business challenges from the outset. For example, something as common as switching to new hardware can become unnecessarily complicated, and data can be lost. Since all files are always available and trackable in the cloud, Exporo can manage everything centrally. “Thanks to well-thought-out features such as version history, many ‘data lives’ have already been saved at Exporo,” says Simon Brunke, CEO of Exporo.

A smart workplace to overcome common and uncommon challenges

Also, in the real estate world, many documents require legally valid signatures and, when dealing with paper, getting them can slow processes to a halt. Recognizing the need for more efficient, effective workflows, they knew they needed to add an eSignature solution. Since Exporo already relied on Dropbox from the very beginning with a digital business model and fully digital workflows, adding Dropbox Sign was a simple decision.

Using Dropbox Sign allows Exporo to share digital documents easily. So, getting a signature from someone on the other side of the planet only takes a few clicks. Now, instead of having tons of signature folders with agreements and contracts from the personnel department or the accounting department on his desk, Brunke can manage all of his documents with two or three clicks. This considerably simplifies business administration and organization. “The potential to be seamlessly linked with other tools, viewed from the operational work nowadays decides whether an application wins or loses”, summarizes Brunke.

For many companies, the sudden move to working from home was a huge challenge. But not for Exporo. Instead, they could easily support a distributed working model when it became necessary because the processes were already in place. From now on, it'll be effortless to let employees continue working from home because Dropbox allows them to store and access everything, wherever, whenever.