Find how much you have
Sign in and check the profile name at the top right of the Loops page. Dotloop calls each transaction workspace a loop, and loops are shown per profile, so a brokerage on Business+ or Teams uses the admin profile while an individual agent uses their own.
On the Loops page, open Filters. Set the archived option to show all loops, because archived loops are hidden by default, and leave Loop Status and Review Stage unchecked so every status appears. Sort by creation date to see where your history starts.
Brokers and team admins: from the admin profile, click the Reporting icon, then Report Builder. Name the report, leave the status and review stage boxes empty (Dotloop treats none selected as all), keep Creation Date as the date type and set a start and end date. Dotloop limits each report's date filter to one year at most, so run one report per year.
Dotloop emails you when each report is ready. Click the report's name to download a CSV. Each file holds loop details such as property, contract and closing information, and leaves out the people and roles. Count the rows in every file and add them up. This is your loop count.
Check the total against the Loops page for one year, with archived loops shown. Dotloop's Report Builder page does not say whether archived loops are included, so if the numbers differ, ask Dotloop before you report a figure.
To size the documents, open a handful of loops of different ages and note how many files sit under Documents in each, then click Show Archived to see the hidden ones. Multiply the average by your loop count and report the result as an estimate.
What to put on your intake
Your intake has five boxes for each system. Here is what goes in each one for Dotloop.
- What does it hold?
- Your transaction workspaces: property and contract details, tasks, participants, signed documents and an activity trail for each deal. Say which deal types you run, for example: residential listing and buyer-side purchase loops with contracts, addenda and disclosures.
- Data types
- Structured records for loop details. Add Text only if you are willing to license the document PDFs themselves, since those are signed contracts and carry the most personal information.
- How big is it?
- Choose Transactions and enter the total rows from your Report Builder files. Put the estimated number of documents in the description.
- Verified or estimated
- Verified when the count comes from Report Builder files covering every year and you have checked it against the Loops page. Estimated when you counted one year or two and scaled up, and always estimated for the document count.
- Records start
- The creation date of your oldest loop. If you moved from paper or another system, say when digital loops began.
Exporting the full history
If a buyer licenses your records, this is how the full history comes out of Dotloop.
A buyer export happens only after a license is signed and the scope is agreed: which years, which deal types, whether document PDFs are in, and whether participant details are in at all. Separately, Dotloop's help says loops and documents cannot be deleted, only archived. That does not tell you what happens to them if an account is closed or an agent leaves a brokerage, so ask Dotloop and keep your own copy.
For loop-level data, a Business+ or Teams admin runs Report Builder once per year of history, as in the steps above, and downloads each CSV. The completed reports stay listed at the bottom of the Report Builder page, so you can come back to them.
For participants, contacts, the activity trail and the PDFs, Dotloop's help center describes a Google Drive backup run by an outside company, API Nation. It writes a subfolder per loop to your Google Drive and builds Google Sheets for contacts, participants, loops and activity logs. You choose the profiles, a start date, which loop statuses and whether to include PDFs. API Nation asks you to pick a paid plan if you have no active subscription. The article puts the first copy at 3 to 4 days on average, depending on volume, and says roughly 50 documents move every 15 minutes, so a large brokerage should expect longer. A separate API Nation Google Sheets sync writes one row per loop with 91 fields, including roles and contact details.
To pull documents by hand, open a loop, tick the boxes beside the files you want, click the three dots beside the Edit button and choose Download. This is practical for a handful of loops, not a whole history.
Developers can use the Dotloop Public API v2. You request access through Dotloop's developer site and receive a client ID and secret, then sign in with OAuth 2.0. Loop lists and the activity feed are paged up to 100 at a time, and each app gets 100 requests per minute per user. Webhooks are only available on request.
Under the license, names, contact details, addresses, signatures and other identifiers are removed from the loop data before anything reaches a buyer, and any documents are reviewed before they are included.
We only ask for an export after you sign a license and agree the scope. Sizing your data for the intake never needs one.
Limits to know
- Dotloop describes Report Builder for Business+ and Teams accounts, and it only opens from the admin profile. For other plans the pages we reviewed describe no data export, so count loop by loop and ask Dotloop what is available.
- Each Report Builder report can cover at most one year, and the file leaves out the people and roles. A ten-year history means ten reports, and participants come from the backup sync or the API.
- The Reporting tab is not a history tool. It shows year to date or the last 30, 60 or 90 days, and Premium accounts see only their own data, not the whole brokerage.
- Archived loops are hidden by default and archived documents sit behind Show Archived. In the Google Drive backup, archived loops sync but archived documents do not, and archiving a document that was already copied removes it from Google Drive. Dotloop archives a document when it is replaced with a newer one, so the backup can miss earlier versions of a document.
- The Activity Log shows the last 7 days, the last 30 days or a custom 30-day range, and the help page does not describe a way to export it. The backup sync writes an activity sheet, but do not count on a long audit trail without it.
- The Public API says loop access is restricted to individual profiles, and that requests against office or company profiles can return a 403 error, so API pulls go through agents' individual profiles rather than the brokerage profile. Access tokens usually last 12 hours, only one is valid at a time, and an app that goes over 100 requests a minute per user gets HTTP 429.
- The API reference's change log says its Document API was introduced to upload and download documents, but the endpoint pages we reviewed only show listing documents and reading their details. Ask Dotloop how file downloads work over the API before planning around it.
- The Google Drive backup is a third-party service. Settings such as profiles and folder names cannot be changed once it starts, and what it copies stays in your Drive even if you cancel API Nation.
This guide isn't legal advice. Check your contracts, and any recording-consent rules that apply, with your own lawyer.
Why buyers value it
A Dotloop loop records how a real estate deal actually moved: which forms were used, which addenda and amendments were added, when each party viewed and signed, how long it took to get from contract to close, and whether it closed at all. That sequence of decisions and outcomes is what buyers building contract review, deal-risk and transaction-timeline models cannot get from listing data.
The value grows with volume and with outcome fields. A few thousand loops across several years, tagged by transaction type, price band and final status, show patterns in cancellations, extensions and negotiation that public records only hint at.
What stays private
Buyer, seller and agent names, phone numbers, email addresses, property addresses where they identify a person, signatures and initials are removed or generalized. Document PDFs are the most sensitive part of a loop, because they contain signed personal details and financial terms and can include lender details, so they are excluded unless a specific package is agreed and each file is reviewed.
Commission splits for named agents, brokerage agreements, and anything tied to your login or account settings are not part of the license. Third-party content such as company and association form templates stays with its owners.
Common questions
Sources
Vendor documentation, checked . Screens and plans change, so if a step looks different in your account, check with Dotloop.
- Dotloop Help: Broker Report Builder (opens in a new tab)
- Dotloop Help: Reporting (opens in a new tab)
- Dotloop Help: Filters and Sorting (opens in a new tab)
- Dotloop Help: Archive a Loop (opens in a new tab)
- Dotloop Help: Loops FAQ (opens in a new tab)
- Dotloop Help: Documents FAQ (opens in a new tab)
- Dotloop Help: Replacing Documents (opens in a new tab)
- Dotloop Help: How to Print and Download (opens in a new tab)
- Dotloop Help: Activity Log (opens in a new tab)
- Dotloop Help: Google Drive Backup via API Nation (opens in a new tab)
- Dotloop Help: Google Sheets via API Nation (opens in a new tab)
- Dotloop Public API v2 reference (opens in a new tab)