Building a Brokerage Tech Strategy for 2024: Lessons From 92 Industry Leaders

Over the past year, we published 11 posts breaking down the findings from our 2023 State of Real Estate Brokerage Technology Survey, conducted in collaboration with T3 Sixty. 92 leaders from over 100 of the top brokerages in the United States told us how they buy, use, and feel about technology.

This is the final post in the series. It pulls the full picture together.

The short version: brokerages are over-tooled and under-integrated. The average brokerage runs 20.4 technology tools but pays for five or fewer of them directly. Front office spending dwarfs back office investment by a 3-to-1 ratio. CRM adoption among agents is still poor. Most agents barely interact with back office systems. And when you ask brokerage leaders what they actually want from technology, the answer is not more tools. It is fewer tools that work together.

Here is what the data tells us, and a practical roadmap for doing something about it.

The full picture from 92 brokerages

If you have been following this series, you already know the individual findings. But seeing them together changes how you read them.

The average brokerage uses 20.4 technology tools, up from 12.4 in 2020. Yet 60.87% of brokerages pay for five or fewer. The rest of those tools are agent-purchased, team-purchased, or cobbled together from free trials and workarounds. Nobody fully controls the stack, and nobody can report on what it actually produces.

Front office tools get 63% of the technology budget. Back office gets 20%. That means lead generation, marketing, and CRM tools receive three times the investment of the systems that handle transactions, commissions, compliance, and financial reporting. The stuff that actually determines whether you made money on a deal.

Meanwhile, only 28.26% of brokerage leaders say their technology drives productivity. 16.30% said their tech simply checks a box. And this is after 83% of brokerages added at least one new tool in the past two years. More spending, more tools, and most people cannot say it is actually helping.

Add to that: CRM adoption is below 50% at 68% of brokerages. Brokerages are spending heavily on front office tools that their agents are not even using consistently. And 70.65% of agents have limited or no interaction with back office systems, which means compliance data, transaction status, and financial information flow through manual handoffs and email chains.

When asked about their top concerns, brokerage leaders pointed to interest rates (48.91%), housing supply (46.74%), recruiting (43.48%), margins (34.78%), and technology adoption (29.35%). The first two are market forces you cannot control. The last three are operations problems that trace directly back to how your systems work.

And when asked what they actually wish their technology could do, the answers were consistent: integration, platform consolidation, and transaction management. Not more features. Not more software. Connection between what they already have.

Five problems hiding inside these numbers

The survey data points to five distinct operational problems. Most brokerages are dealing with all of them at once.

The first is fragmented systems. Data lives in a dozen places. Transaction information is in one tool, commission calculations are in a spreadsheet, compliance documents are in email or a file share, and accounting is in yet another system. Nobody has a single place to look and get a complete picture of what the brokerage is doing.

The second is manual compliance. File reviews, checklist tracking, and document collection still happen by hand at most brokerages. That is slow when volume is low. It is a real liability when volume picks up and your compliance team cannot keep pace.

Third is commission complexity. Splits, caps, tiers, team structures, bonuses, and exceptions are the hardest thing to calculate correctly in a brokerage. Most operations still depend on spreadsheets for this. Errors in commission calculations erode trust with agents faster than almost anything else, and they directly affect recruiting and retention.

Fourth, there is no real reporting. When we talk to brokers, the same question comes up: “How is my brokerage actually doing right now?” Most cannot answer it without pulling data from three or four systems and spending hours reconciling numbers. That is not reporting. That is archaeology.

And fifth is operational drag. Staff time gets consumed by coordination, data entry, follow-ups, and reconciliation. The operational cost of running a fragmented tech stack is not just the subscription fees. It is the hidden labor cost of keeping everything stitched together by hand.

These five problems compound each other. Fragmented systems cause manual compliance. Manual compliance creates operational drag. Operational drag makes it impossible to get accurate reporting. And without reporting, you cannot even see how much the whole thing is costing you.

A 4-step roadmap for 2024

This is not theoretical. These are the four things you can do this year to turn your technology from a cost center into operational infrastructure that actually works.

Step 1: Audit your current stack

Make a list of every tool your brokerage uses. Not just what you pay for. What your agents use. What your teams subscribe to. What your offices adopted on their own. You need the real number, not the number on your accounting report.

Most brokerages find the real count is significantly higher than what they thought. That gap is where risk lives: tools nobody manages, data nobody can access, and subscriptions nobody tracks.

For each tool, write down what it does, who uses it, what it costs, and whether it connects to anything else. You will probably end up with a tech stack that looks a lot messier on paper than it did in your head. That is the point.

Step 2: Identify what agents actually use

The survey made this painfully clear. Brokerages are spending money on tools their agents do not use. CRM adoption is below 50% at most brokerages, and agents have limited interaction with back office systems.

Talk to your agents. Not the top producers who already have their own systems figured out. Talk to the middle of your roster. Find out what they actually open every day, what they ignore, and what frustrates them. Technology that agents do not use is not technology. It is overhead.

This step usually reveals that agents care about a few things: getting paid correctly and on time, knowing where their deals stand, and not being asked to enter the same information twice. They do not care about your tech stack. They care about whether their day to day experience is smooth or full of friction.

Step 3: Invest in back office infrastructure that connects everything

This is where most brokerages have the biggest gap. 63% of the budget goes to front office tools. 20% goes to back office. But the back office is where transactions get managed, commissions get calculated, compliance gets enforced, and financial reporting happens. It is the operational core of your business.

The right approach is not building your own system from spreadsheets and custom workarounds. And it is not buying another narrow point solution that only handles one piece of the puzzle. It is investing in a platform that handles transactions, commissions, compliance, and reporting as one connected system.

That platform becomes the foundation everything else connects to. Your agents can keep their CRM. Your marketing team can keep their tools. But the back office finally has a single system of record that gives you control and visibility across the entire operation.

Step 4: Measure technology by operational outcomes, not feature lists

This is the mindset shift. Stop evaluating software by counting features and comparing screenshots. Start measuring what your technology actually produces in operational terms.

Can you close a transaction from start to finish without re-entering data? Can you calculate commissions without a spreadsheet? Can you tell right now, today, what your brokerage produced last month broken out by agent, office, and deal type? Can your compliance team review files without chasing agents for documents?

Those are the questions that matter. Not how many integrations a vendor lists on their website or how many features they crammed into their last release. If your technology cannot answer basic operational questions, it does not matter how polished it looks.

How this connects to recruiting and margins

Two of the top five concerns from the survey were recruiting (43.48%) and margins (34.78%). Both are directly tied to your back office infrastructure.

Agents who get paid incorrectly leave. Agents who have to chase down their commission statements leave. Agents who feel like their brokerage cannot keep basic operational details straight leave. Your recruiting pitch is only as strong as the operational experience you actually deliver.

On margins, every hour your staff spends on manual data entry, commission corrections, compliance follow-ups, and report assembly is money you are spending on work that software should handle. That operational waste shows up directly in your profit margins. You cannot cost-cut your way to profitability if your systems create the costs in the first place.

Where TotalBrokerage fits

TotalBrokerage is the back office operating system for residential real estate brokerages. It handles transactions, commissions, compliance, reporting, e-signatures, and agent management in one platform.

We are not a CRM. We are not a marketing tool. We are not trying to replace every piece of software in your stack. We are the operational foundation that the rest of your stack connects to.

Every transaction, every commission calculation, every compliance check, every financial report lives in one place. You stop juggling spreadsheets. You stop reconciling data between systems. You stop guessing what your brokerage actually produced last month.

This survey confirmed what we see with brokerages every day. The ones running the best operations are not the ones with the most software. They are the ones with a connected back office that gives them control, visibility, and financial accuracy.

If that sounds like what you need, book a demo and see it for yourself.

About this survey series

The 2023 State of Real Estate Brokerage Technology Survey was conducted by TotalBrokerage in collaboration with T3 Sixty. 92 brokerage leaders from over 100 of the top brokerages in the United States participated.

This is the twelfth and final post in the series. Here is the full list:

1. State of Brokerage Technology 2023: What 92 Brokerage Leaders Told Us
2. 20 Tools and Counting: Why Brokerages Are Drowning in Software
3. The 3 Concerns Keeping Brokerage Leaders Up at Night
4. How Technology Affects Agent Recruiting
5. Your Back Office Gets 20% of the Tech Budget. It Deserves More.
6. Is Your Brokerage Technology Actually Driving Productivity?
7. CRM Adoption Rates at Brokerages Are Worse Than You Think
8. What Brokerages Actually Want From Technology
9. Agent Technology Adoption Is a Compliance Risk
10. The Hidden Operational Costs Eating Your Profit Margins
11. Rolling Out New Technology Without a Strategy Is Worse Than Doing Nothing
12. Building a Brokerage Tech Strategy for 2024: Lessons From 92 Industry Leaders (this post)

FAQ

How many technology tools does the average real estate brokerage use in 2024?

The average brokerage uses 20.4 technology tools, according to the 2023 State of Real Estate Brokerage Technology Survey by TotalBrokerage and T3 Sixty. That is up from 12.4 in 2020. Most brokerages only pay for five or fewer of those tools directly. The rest are agent-purchased, team-purchased, or free tools filling gaps that the brokerage-provided stack does not cover.

Why are brokerages not seeing results from their technology investments?

Only 28.26% of brokerage leaders said their technology drives productivity. The core issue is fragmentation. 83% of brokerages added at least one new tool in the past two years, but adding tools without connecting them to a central system just creates more data silos, more logins, and more manual work. The brokerages reporting the best outcomes are consolidating their tech stacks rather than expanding them.

What should a brokerage technology strategy prioritize in 2024?

Start with an honest audit of every tool in your stack, including what agents and teams buy on their own. Then figure out what agents actually use versus what you are paying for. Invest in back office infrastructure that connects transactions, commissions, compliance, and reporting in one system. And measure your technology by operational outcomes, not feature counts.

How does back office technology affect agent recruiting and retention?

Agents leave brokerages that cannot pay them correctly or on time. Commission errors, slow processing, and poor operational experiences erode trust faster than almost anything else. When your back office runs on connected infrastructure instead of spreadsheets and manual processes, agents get a smoother experience. That becomes a real recruiting advantage in a market where 43.48% of brokerage leaders say recruiting is a top concern.

What is the difference between front office and back office technology for brokerages?

Front office technology covers tools agents interact with directly: websites, lead generation, CRM, and marketing platforms. Back office technology covers the operational core: transaction management, commission calculation, compliance tracking, accounting integration, and financial reporting. The survey found that front office gets 63% of the average technology budget while back office gets 20%. That imbalance is a problem because the back office is where financial accuracy, compliance, and operational visibility actually live.

What did brokerage leaders say they want most from technology?

When asked about wish lists, the same themes dominated: integration, platform consolidation, and better transaction management. Brokerage leaders are not asking for more features or more software. They want the tools they already have to talk to each other, and they want a central platform that handles core operations without requiring constant manual intervention.