Building a Brokerage Tech Strategy for 2025: What 100+ Leaders Told Us to Fix
Two years of survey data. One roadmap. Here is the 2025 tech strategy for brokerages that want to stop wasting money.
Last year we published a strategy roadmap based on our first year of survey data. It was built from what 92 brokerage leaders told us about their technology, their concerns, and their operations. The advice was straightforward: audit your stack, find out what agents actually use, invest in the back office, and measure technology by outcomes.
One year later, we have a second full year of data. Over 100 leaders participated in the 2024 State of Real Estate Brokerage Technology Survey, conducted by TotalBrokerage in collaboration with T3 Sixty. Every trend from the first year either continued or got worse. The advice has not changed. The urgency has.
This is the capstone post for the 2024 survey series. It synthesizes two years of findings into one roadmap – five steps that address the problems brokerage leaders keep telling us about.
Two years of data, one consistent picture
Here is the short version of what two years of surveying the top brokerages in the United States produced.
Optimism collapsed. Strong optimism dropped from over 40% in 2023 to approximately 15% in 2024. Nearly 30% of leaders described themselves as somewhat pessimistic, very pessimistic, or uncertain.
Margins replaced rates as the number one concern. In 2023, rising interest rates led at 48.91%. In 2024, reduced profit margins climbed to the top spot. Rates dropped. The problem shifted from a market condition you sit through to an operational problem you can do something about.
The checkbox number nearly doubled. In 2023, 16.30% of brokerages said their technology simply checks a box. In 2024, that figure rose to approximately 30%. The percentage saying tech is integral to operations got cut in half, from 39.13% to approximately 20%. More brokerages now describe their technology as a checkbox than as a productivity driver.
CRM satisfaction cratered. Average CRM satisfaction dropped from approximately 3.7 stars to approximately 3.2. The "love and recommend" group was cut roughly in half. The "don't like at all" group tripled, from 5.56% to approximately 15%.
Transaction management ranked as the number one tech concern. When asked what technology area concerns them most, brokerage leaders put transaction management at the top, tied with lead generation at approximately 7 out of 10 in importance. The back office is finally getting attention. But only as a concern, not yet as a budget priority.
AI interest surged without the foundation to support it. Approximately 48% of respondents identified AI as the emerging technology they are most interested in. In 2023, AI barely registered. The interest is real, but approximately 40% of brokerages have technology adoption below 50%, and 30% of tech is just checking a box. AI needs clean, connected data. Most brokerages do not have it.
The back office stayed frozen. Approximately 55% of brokerages have not changed their back office technology in six months or more. In a year where margins became the top concern and satisfaction dropped across the board, more than half the industry did not touch the systems managing their money.
Per-agent technology costs vary wildly. Approximately 28% of brokerages spend under $50 per agent per month. Roughly 18% spend over $200. Higher spending does not correlate with better outcomes.
None of these findings exist in isolation. They are all connected. And they all point to the same underlying set of problems.
The five problems underneath everything
Across both years, every major finding in the survey traces back to one or more of these five operational problems. We named them in the 2023 capstone. The 2024 data confirmed every one of them and made the case stronger.
Fragmented systems. Data scattered across transaction tools, accounting software, spreadsheets, and shared drives. No single source of truth. When your broker has to pull numbers from four different systems to answer a basic financial question, fragmentation is the reason.
Manual compliance. File reviews, checklists, document collection, and approvals done by hand. This was manageable at low volume. With the NAR settlement creating new compliance requirements, it is not. Manual processes do not scale and they create liability every time someone forgets a step.
Commission complexity. Splits, caps, tiers, team structures, bonuses, and exceptions calculated in spreadsheets or in the head of one back-office person. Commission errors cost real money and erode agent trust. When your top concern is margins, getting commissions wrong in either direction is a direct hit.
No real reporting. The broker cannot answer fundamental questions – profitability by agent, performance by office, trends over time – without hours of manual assembly. In 2024, when respondents described how they measure technology success, the most common words were usage, adoption, agent, sales, closings, and transactions. They want outcomes. Their systems give them activity at best.
Operational drag. Staff time burned on coordination, data entry, follow-ups, reconciliation, and rework. This is the invisible cost. It does not appear as a line item. It appears as everything taking longer than it should, and it compounds every month you do not fix it.
These five problems reinforce each other. Fragmented systems cause manual compliance. Manual compliance creates operational drag. Operational drag consumes the bandwidth you would need to fix the fragmentation. The loop does not break on its own.
What brokerages said they actually want
Before getting to the roadmap, look at what brokerage leaders identified as their biggest opportunities. This was a new question in the 2024 survey, and the answers tell you exactly where to focus.
| Opportunity | Approximate % |
|---|---|
| Improving agent productivity | ~48% |
| Lead generation and conversion | ~45% |
| Streamlining transaction processes | ~38% |
| Automating repetitive tasks | ~35% |
| Improving communication | ~35% |
| Gaining competitive advantage | ~30% |
| Reducing operational costs | ~28% |
| Improving customer experience | ~28% |
| Third-party integration | ~28% |
| Data analytics and reporting | ~25% |
| Training and onboarding | ~25% |
| Expanding marketing reach | ~22% |
Agent productivity and transaction streamlining together sit at the top. Automation, integration, and analytics are all clustered in the middle. These are not feature requests. They are operational outcomes. Brokerages are telling you they want their people to do more real work and less busywork, and they want their systems to connect instead of create friction.
The roadmap that follows is built to deliver those outcomes. Not with more tools. With a better approach to the tools you already have and the one system you are probably missing.
A 5-step tech strategy for 2025
Step 1: Audit your current stack – all of it
This was step one in the 2023 roadmap. It is still step one because most brokerages have not done it.
You need a complete inventory of every technology tool in your brokerage. Not just what shows up on your accounting report. What your agents use. What your teams subscribe to. What your offices adopted without asking. Every free trial that never got canceled. Every spreadsheet doing the job a system should do.
The 2023 survey found the average brokerage uses 20.4 tools but pays for five or fewer directly. That gap is where problems hide. Tools nobody manages, data nobody can access, subscriptions nobody tracks.
For each tool, document four things: what it does, who uses it, what it costs, and whether it connects to anything else. Most brokerages find the real picture is messier than they thought. That mess is what is driving the per-agent cost spread we saw in the 2024 benchmarking data. A brokerage spending $200 per agent with disconnected tools is getting worse results than one spending $75 with a connected system.
The audit is not a one-time project. Make it something you revisit quarterly. Your tech stack drifts if you are not watching it.
Step 2: Fix the back office first
The 2024 survey made this unambiguous. Transaction management is the number one technology concern. Margins are the number one business concern. And 55% of brokerages have not touched their back office in over six months.
The back office is where transactions get managed, commissions get calculated, compliance gets enforced, and financial reporting happens. It is where the money gets tracked. When this layer is fragmented – transaction management in one tool, commissions in a spreadsheet, compliance in email, accounting in QuickBooks with manually entered numbers – every other tool in your stack underperforms. Including your CRM.
The CRM satisfaction collapse in 2024 was not because CRM products got worse. It happened because the environment around the CRM got more dysfunctional. When agents bounce between six disconnected tools to close a deal, the optional one – the CRM – gets ignored. Fix the operational foundation and the rest of the stack starts working the way it was supposed to.
This does not mean you need to rip everything out. It means you need a single system of record for the back office that handles transactions, commissions, compliance, and reporting in one connected platform. Everything else plugs into that. Your agents keep their CRM. Your marketing team keeps their tools. The back office finally works.
Step 3: Measure by outcomes, not features
The checkbox number doubling from 16.30% to approximately 30% is the most damning finding in two years of data. It tells you that brokerages are surrounded by technology that does not produce measurable results.
When we asked how brokerages measure technology success, the word cloud was telling: usage, adoption, agent, sales, closings, transactions. Brokerage leaders are not interested in feature counts on a vendor's pricing page. They want to know if the software shows up in production numbers.
Here is a practical test. Can your technology answer these questions right now, without manual assembly?
- What did your brokerage produce last month, broken out by agent and office?
- What is your average commission per transaction after all splits, caps, and fees?
- How many transactions are in your pipeline, and where does each one stand?
- Are all your open files compliant, and which ones are missing documents?
- What is your actual cost per transaction when you include staff time on manual processes?
If you need spreadsheets, phone calls, or "let me check with someone" to answer any of those, your technology is checking a box. The tool might have great features. But it is not producing operational outcomes.
When you evaluate vendors, lead with these questions. Not "what does it do" but "what does it let me know."
Step 4: Consolidate before you add
The instinct when something is not working is to buy something new. The 2023 data showed that – 83% of brokerages added at least one new tool in two years. The 2024 data shows what that accomplished: approximately nothing. Satisfaction went down. The checkbox number went up. Adoption stayed flat.
The approximately 48% interest in AI is the latest version of this same instinct. AI is genuinely powerful, but it runs on clean, connected data. If your operational data lives in five different places with incomplete entry and no integration, AI will give you answers based on garbage. You will get confident-sounding reports built on partial information.
Before you add anything new, consolidate what you have. Look at the audit from step one. Identify the tools that overlap. Find the manual processes that exist because two tools do not talk to each other. Map the data that gets entered more than once.
The approximately 28% of respondents who identified third-party integration as a top opportunity are describing this problem. They do not want more tools. They want the tools they have to work together. Consolidation addresses both the cost and the dysfunction at the same time.
Once you have a connected operational system – one place where transactions, commissions, compliance, and reporting live – then adding an AI layer, a new analytics tool, or anything else becomes a decision built on solid ground instead of wishful thinking.
Step 5: Choose vendors on partnership, not features
The 2024 survey included questions on vendor support satisfaction. The results reinforce something that does not get enough attention in technology decisions: the vendor relationship matters as much as the product.
When approximately 45% of brokerages that switched technology did so because of improved functionality and not cost, they were telling you something important. They did not leave because the price was wrong. They left because the product did not keep up with their operations.
A vendor that ships features and disappears is not a partner. A partner understands your commission structures. A partner helps you migrate data without losing a quarter. A partner picks up the phone when your compliance deadline is tomorrow and something is not working.
When you evaluate technology, ask three questions that have nothing to do with features:
- How does this vendor handle onboarding and migration?
- What does support look like after month three, when the enthusiasm wears off and the real questions start?
- Does this vendor understand how brokerages actually run, or are they building for a version of the industry that exists in pitch decks?
The brokerages that treat technology as a vendor relationship rather than a software subscription make better decisions. The survey data backs this up.
What this means heading into 2025
Two years of data from over 100 of the top brokerages in the United States tell a consistent story. The industry is over-tooled and under-integrated. The back office is neglected. The tools that get the most budget attention produce the least satisfaction. And the problems – fragmented systems, manual compliance, commission complexity, reporting gaps, operational drag – are not going away on their own.
The brokerages that come out of this cycle stronger will be the ones that stopped treating technology as a shopping list and started treating it as operational infrastructure. Audit what you have. Fix the foundation. Measure what matters. Consolidate before you add. And pick partners who understand how your business actually works.
That is not a complicated strategy. But looking at two years of survey data, it is the one most brokerages have not executed yet. The opportunity is still there.
Where TotalBrokerage fits
TotalBrokerage is the back-office operating system for residential real estate brokerages. 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 be everything in your stack. We are the operational foundation that everything else connects to.
Every problem in this roadmap – fragmented systems, manual compliance, commission complexity, reporting gaps, operational drag – is what TotalBrokerage was built to solve. Not with more features piled on top of a broken infrastructure, but by replacing the patchwork of spreadsheets, disconnected tools, and manual processes with a single system of record.
The survey confirmed what we see working 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 you have read through two years of survey findings and recognized your brokerage in the data, book a demo and see what it looks like when the back office actually works.
About this survey series
The State of Real Estate Brokerage Technology Survey is an annual study conducted by TotalBrokerage in collaboration with T3 Sixty. The 2023 survey established the industry's first comprehensive benchmark, with 92 brokerage leaders participating. The 2024 survey expanded to over 100 respondents and tracked how every major metric changed over one year.
This is the capstone post for the 2024 survey series. Here is the full list of 2024 posts:
- State of Brokerage Technology 2024: What Changed in One Year
- Brokerage Market Confidence Dropped 25 Points
- Profit Margins Are Now the #1 Concern
- 30% of Brokerages Say Their Tech Just Checks a Box
- CRM Satisfaction Dropped to 3.2 Stars
- How Much Brokerages Spend on Technology Per Agent
- Transaction Management Ranked #1 Tech Concern
- 48% of Brokerages Want AI. Most Are Not Ready.
- 55% Have Not Changed Their Back Office in 6+ Months
- Vendor Support Satisfaction in 2024
- NAR Settlement and Brokerage Compliance Technology
- Building a Brokerage Tech Strategy for 2025: What 100+ Leaders Told Us to Fix (this post)
And the 2023 capstone: Building a Brokerage Tech Strategy for 2024: Lessons From 92 Industry Leaders
FAQ
What are the biggest technology changes brokerages saw between 2023 and 2024?
The most significant shifts were the rise of profit margins to the number one concern (up from number four in 2023 at 34.78%), the near-doubling of the checkbox response from 16.30% to approximately 30%, the CRM satisfaction collapse from approximately 3.7 to 3.2 stars, and the surge in AI interest to approximately 48%. Transaction management became the top technology concern. And 55% of brokerages reported not changing their back office in six or more months. The full year-over-year comparison is in the 2024 survey overview.
What should a brokerage technology strategy prioritize in 2025?
Start with a complete audit of every tool in your stack, including what agents and teams buy on their own. Then fix the back office, which the survey identified as the number one technology concern area. Measure your technology by operational outcomes, not feature lists. Consolidate tools before adding new ones. And choose vendors based on partnership quality, not product demos. The five-step roadmap in this post walks through each of these in detail, with supporting data from both the 2023 and 2024 surveys.
Why does the roadmap say to fix the back office before adding AI?
Because AI depends on clean, connected, structured data to produce useful results. The 2024 survey found that approximately 48% of brokerages are interested in AI, but approximately 30% say their current technology just checks a box and roughly 40% have overall adoption below 50%. If your transaction data is in one system, commissions in a spreadsheet, and compliance in a shared drive, there is no coherent dataset for AI to work with. Fix the operational foundation first, then AI becomes a practical tool instead of a science project. The AI readiness post covers this in depth.
How do brokerages measure whether their technology is working?
When asked, brokerage leaders most commonly used words like usage, adoption, agent, sales, closings, and transactions. They are measuring technology by whether their people use it and whether it shows up in production numbers. That is the right instinct. The problem is that most brokerage tech stacks cannot connect tool usage to business outcomes because the systems are not integrated. The checkbox analysis explores why this gap keeps widening.
What are the five core problems the survey identified?
Both years of survey data point to the same five operational problems: fragmented systems with no single source of truth, manual compliance processes that do not scale, commission complexity managed in spreadsheets, lack of real-time financial reporting, and operational drag from coordination and data re-entry. These five problems are interconnected and compound each other. Every major survey finding, from the margin concern to the technology satisfaction drop to the back-office stagnation, traces back to one or more of these.
How does the 2025 roadmap differ from the 2024 roadmap?
The 2024 roadmap had four steps: audit your stack, identify what agents use, invest in back office infrastructure, and measure by outcomes. The 2025 roadmap builds on that with two additional priorities that the second year of data made clear. Step four now focuses explicitly on consolidation before addition, driven by the AI interest surge and the evidence that adding tools without integration produces no improvement. Step five addresses vendor partnership, informed by the 2024 data on why brokerages switch technology and what they look for in support. The core message is the same. The 2024 data just made the case stronger and the recommendations more specific.
Is this roadmap only relevant for large brokerages?
No. The five problems described here, fragmented systems, manual compliance, commission complexity, reporting gaps, and operational drag, exist at every scale. A 20-agent brokerage running commissions in Excel has the same structural problem as a 2,000-agent operation using three disconnected systems. The difference is that larger brokerages feel the compounding costs faster. But the fix is the same: a single system of record for the back office that handles transactions, commissions, compliance, and reporting in one place. The complete guide to brokerage software covers what that looks like across different brokerage sizes.
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