30% of Brokerages Say Their Tech Just Checks a Box. Last Year It Was 16%.
The share of brokerages calling their tech a checkbox nearly doubled. Productivity ratings dropped. Here is the fix.
A year ago we published a post called Only 28% of Brokerages Say Their Tech Drives Productivity. The numbers were bad. One in six brokerages said their technology did nothing meaningful for how they operate.
We just ran the survey again. The numbers got worse.
In the 2024 State of Real Estate Brokerage Technology Survey, conducted by TotalBrokerage in collaboration with T3 Sixty with over 100 respondents, approximately 30% of brokerages now say their technology simply checks a box. That is nearly double the 16.30% from 2023. The share that called their tech integral to operations dropped from 39.13% to approximately 20%. Productivity ratings fell too.
The industry is losing confidence in its own technology. And the strangest part: most brokerages are not doing anything about it.
Year over year: the shift is not subtle
Here is how brokerages described the role technology plays in their business, 2023 versus 2024.
| Response | 2023 | 2024 (approx.) |
|---|---|---|
| Simply checks a box | 16.30% | ~30% |
| Used to drive productivity | 28.26% | ~22% |
| A unique differentiator | 7.61% | ~12% |
| Integral in operating our business | 39.13% | ~20% |
| Other | 8.70% | ~10% |
The two categories that suggest technology is actually working for the brokerage, productivity and integral, both dropped. The checkbox category nearly doubled. The only category that grew meaningfully besides checkbox was unique differentiator, which moved from 7.61% to approximately 12%. A small group of brokerages are pulling ahead. Everyone else is falling further behind.
That split matters. The brokerages figuring out technology are separating from the ones who are not. And the gap is widening, not closing.
Brokerages know it is broken but are not fixing it
Here is the paradox in this year's data. Approximately 55% of respondents said they have not changed their back office technology in six or more months. More than half the industry is sitting on systems they increasingly believe are not working, and they are not making moves to change them.
Why? Because changing back office technology is hard. It touches transactions, commissions, compliance, accounting. It affects every person in the operation. Swapping one tool means retraining staff, migrating data, and hoping the new system actually talks to everything else. Most brokerages look at that list and decide to live with what they have.
But living with it has a compounding cost. Every month on disconnected systems means more manual data entry, more commission errors, more time your staff spends on coordination instead of running the business. The operational drag gets worse, not better, the longer you wait.
New tools are still coming. They are still not helping.
Approximately 45% of brokerages rolled out one to three new technology tools in the past two years. Another approximately 10% added four to six. About 5% added seven to ten. And approximately 20% added none at all.
So the majority of brokerages are still buying new software. But the productivity and satisfaction numbers above tell you what that new software is accomplishing. The pattern from last year repeats: more tools, same problems. We wrote about why this keeps happening in Rolling Out New Brokerage Technology Without Strategy.
Adding a tool without connecting it to your operational core just gives you another login, another data silo, and another thing someone has to maintain. The brokerages that moved from checkbox to integral did the opposite. They stopped accumulating and started consolidating.
Adoption is all over the map
We asked brokerages about overall technology adoption rates across their organizations.
Approximately 28% reported adoption below 20%. Another approximately 12% said adoption sat between 20% and 49%. About 12% reported exactly 50%. Approximately 28% fell between 51% and 80%. And about 20% reported adoption above 80%.
Read those numbers carefully. More than a quarter of brokerages have less than 20% adoption of the technology they are paying for. That means 80% or more of the people in those organizations are not using the tools the brokerage provides. You can buy the best software available and it does not matter if your agents and staff are not on it.
Low adoption is not an agent problem. It is a system problem. When agents have too many logins, too many disconnected tools, or technology that makes their day harder instead of easier, they stop using it. You cannot train your way out of a bad tech stack.
What brokerages say success looks like
When we asked how brokerages measure technology success, the most common words were usage, adoption, agent, sales, closings, and transactions. That tells you something. Brokerages are not measuring technology success by the number of features on a vendor's pricing page. They are measuring it by whether their people actually use it and whether it shows up in production numbers.
This lines up with what we have been saying since the first survey. The technology that earns its keep is the technology that is embedded in daily operations. Transactions, commissions, compliance, reporting. If a tool is not part of how deals get done and money gets tracked, it will end up as a checkbox.
The fix is the same as last year, but the stakes are higher
Last year we said the answer is not more software. It is connecting the systems that matter. That has not changed. What changed is the urgency.
When 16% of brokerages called their tech a checkbox, you could argue it was a minority problem. At approximately 30%, it is the plurality. More brokerages now describe their technology as a checkbox than describe it as a productivity driver or an integral part of operations. The default experience of brokerage technology in 2024 is that it does not work well enough.
And the 55% who have not changed their back office in six months or more are running out of runway. Markets shift. Commission structures get more complex. Compliance requirements grow. The brokerages with connected operational systems will absorb those changes. The ones running on fragmented tools and spreadsheets will absorb the cost.
What to do about it
If your brokerage is in the checkbox category, or heading there, the path forward is the same one the top 20% already took. Stop thinking about technology as a collection of individual tools. Start thinking about it as an operational system.
That means your transactions, commissions, compliance, and reporting need to live in one place. Not in four separate tools that someone stitches together with manual processes. One system of record where data flows between workflows automatically, where the broker can see what is happening in real time, and where staff is not burning hours on data entry and reconciliation.
TotalBrokerage was built for exactly this. Transactions, commissions, compliance, e-signatures, reporting, and agent management in a single platform. It works alongside your existing tools. Keep your CRM. Keep your marketing software. TotalBrokerage is the operational backbone underneath it all.
If approximately 30% of the industry says their tech just checks a box, and approximately 55% have not changed their back office in half a year, there is an opening for the brokerages willing to act. The ones who move now will be the ones on the right side of that widening gap.
Book a demo and see what a connected back office actually looks like.
About this survey
The 2024 State of Real Estate Brokerage Technology Survey was conducted by TotalBrokerage in collaboration with T3 Sixty. Over 100 brokerage leaders participated. The survey covered technology usage, satisfaction, adoption, back office operations, and how brokerages measure success across the residential real estate industry.
For the full results, read the 2024 survey overview.
FAQ
Why did the share of brokerages calling their tech a checkbox nearly double?
In 2023, 16.30% of brokerages said their technology simply checks a box. In 2024, that figure rose to approximately 30%. The most likely explanation is that as brokerages added more tools without connecting them, the gap between what their technology costs and what it actually produces became harder to ignore. More tools without better integration leads to more frustration, not less.
What does it mean that 55% of brokerages have not changed their back office in six months?
It means more than half the industry is sitting on back office systems they are increasingly dissatisfied with but have not taken action to improve. Changing back office technology is disruptive because it touches commissions, compliance, accounting, and daily workflows. Most brokerages know their systems are not working well but find the switching cost too intimidating to act on.
How is the 2024 survey different from the 2023 survey?
Both surveys were conducted by TotalBrokerage in collaboration with T3 Sixty. The 2023 survey had 92 respondents. The 2024 survey had over 100. The questions cover similar ground, which allows for year over year comparison. The biggest shifts were in how brokerages describe the role of technology, where the checkbox response nearly doubled and the integral response roughly halved.
Why is low technology adoption a system problem and not an agent problem?
When more than a quarter of brokerages report adoption below 20%, you cannot blame individual agents for being resistant to change. If 80% of the people in your organization are not using the technology you provide, the tools are either too disconnected, too complicated, or too far removed from daily workflows to be useful. Agents adopt tools that make their day easier. They ignore tools that add friction. The fix is better systems, not more training.
What should a brokerage do if their technology just checks a box?
Stop adding new tools and start evaluating whether your existing systems are connected. Can transaction data flow into commission calculations without re-entry? Can your broker pull a financial report without waiting for someone to build a spreadsheet? If the answer to those questions is no, the issue is not missing software. It is fragmented software. The path forward is consolidating your operational core into a single system of record for transactions, commissions, compliance, and reporting.
How does TotalBrokerage help brokerages move from checkbox to integral?
TotalBrokerage centralizes the workflows that make up back office operations: transactions, commissions, compliance, e-signatures, reporting, and agent management. Instead of maintaining separate tools for each of those functions and manually moving data between them, everything lives in one system. That means fewer errors, faster operations, real-time visibility for the broker, and a platform agents will actually adopt because it is part of how deals get done. It works alongside existing CRM and marketing tools without requiring a full technology replacement.
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