The 3 Concerns Keeping Brokerage Leaders Up at Night
Interest rates and inventory are outside your control. But recruiting and margins are not. Here is what 92 brokerage leaders said.
We surveyed 92 brokerage leaders from over 100 of the top brokerages in the United States. We asked them to pick the three biggest concerns facing their business right now. Three answers dominated:
- Rising interest rates (48.91%)
- Lack of housing supply (46.74%)
- Recruiting top performing agents (43.48%)
Reduced profit margins came in fourth at 34.78%, and agent adoption of technology rounded out the top five at 29.35%.
Here is the full breakdown:
| Concern | % of Respondents | Count |
|---|---|---|
| Rising interest rates | 48.91% | 45 |
| Lack of housing supply | 46.74% | 43 |
| Recruiting top performing agents | 43.48% | 40 |
| Reduced profit margins | 34.78% | 32 |
| Agent adoption of technology | 29.35% | 27 |
| Institutional investors in residential real estate | 19.57% | 18 |
| Finding ways to reduce expenses | 19.57% | 18 |
| Less home sales and more rentals | 15.22% | 14 |
| Other | 13.04% | 12 |
Two of the top three concerns are completely outside your control. You cannot set interest rates. You cannot build more housing inventory. But the other concerns on this list? Those are about how you run your brokerage. And that is where the real conversation starts.
Rates and inventory: real problems, zero levers
Nearly half of respondents named rising interest rates as a top concern. Almost as many flagged housing supply. Both are legitimate threats to transaction volume. When rates climb and inventory tightens, deals get harder to close and the pipeline shrinks.
But here is the thing. Every brokerage in America faces those same headwinds. They are not competitive differentiators. The brokerages that come out of a tough market in better shape than their competitors will not be the ones that figured out how to lower interest rates. They will be the ones that got their own house in order while the market was rough.
That means looking at the concerns you actually control.
Recruiting: 43.48% and climbing
Recruiting top performing agents was the third most selected concern, just a few points behind housing supply. That tracks. In a tight market, the agents producing volume are the ones every brokerage wants. And when your top agent gets a call from a competitor promising better technology, faster commission payments, and cleaner reporting, you need a good reason for them to stay.
Most brokers think of recruiting as a relationship game. It is. But relationships only get you in the door. What keeps an agent at your brokerage is the day to day experience of doing business there. Are their commissions accurate? Do they get paid on time? Can they see their production numbers without calling the office? Is their compliance paperwork handled without constant back and forth?
If the answer to any of those questions is “not really,” you have a retention problem dressed up as a recruiting problem. Agents leave brokerages that create friction. They stay at brokerages that run clean operations. The technology advantage in recruiting is not about having the flashiest tools. It is about having systems that work.
We wrote a deeper breakdown of how operational infrastructure directly affects your ability to retain agents.
Reduced profit margins: death by a thousand cuts
One in three brokerage leaders said reduced profit margins are a top concern. In a slower market, that pressure intensifies because your fixed costs do not shrink with your transaction volume.
But most margin erosion does not come from one big line item. It comes from waste spread across the entire operation. A commission error that costs you $800. A compliance issue that takes six staff hours to untangle. A reporting gap that means you did not catch an unprofitable office until the quarter was already over.
These are not dramatic failures. They are the slow bleed that shows up when you look at your year end numbers and wonder where the money went.
The brokerages protecting their margins right now are the ones with real visibility into their financials. They know what each office produces. They know what each agent costs versus what they generate. They can pull that data in minutes, not days. If you cannot answer those questions without pulling numbers from three different systems and a spreadsheet, your margins are leaking and you might not even know where.
We covered this in detail in how accurate reporting helps brokerages win and in our breakdown of brokerage profit margins and operational costs.
The concerns nobody talks about (but should)
Agent adoption of technology hit 29.35%. Finding ways to reduce expenses hit 19.57%. Both of those tie directly back to the same root issue: your operational infrastructure.
When agents will not adopt your technology, it is usually because the technology creates more work for them instead of less. Nobody resists a system that pays them faster and gives them a clear view of their numbers. People resist systems that make them enter the same data twice or hunt for documents across four different platforms.
And when you are looking for expenses to cut, the biggest target is often the labor cost tied to manual processes. Staff hours spent reconciling commissions. Hours spent chasing agents for missing documents. Hours spent assembling reports that should be automatic. Strategic expense management starts with understanding where your team’s time actually goes, and a lot of it goes to tasks that should not require human effort.
What the survey tells us about opportunity
When we asked brokerage leaders about their biggest opportunities, the same themes kept surfacing: agents, technology, market positioning. The leaders who see the current market as an opportunity rather than a crisis are the ones investing in their operations right now.
That is not a coincidence. When the market tightens, operational efficiency stops being a nice to have. It becomes the thing that separates brokerages that grow from brokerages that contract. The full survey results, including technology spending, tool adoption, and satisfaction data, are available in our pillar report on the state of brokerage technology in 2023.
Where TotalBrokerage fits
The two concerns you cannot control, rates and inventory, will sort themselves out over time. The concerns you can control, recruiting, margins, technology adoption, expense management, all connect to the same thing: your back office operations.
TotalBrokerage is the back-office operating system for brokerages. Every transaction, every commission calculation, every compliance workflow, every financial report lives in one system. Commissions are calculated accurately without spreadsheets. Agents can see their numbers without calling the office. Your leadership team can pull production and profitability data in minutes.
That matters for recruiting because agents want to work somewhere that runs well. It matters for margins because you stop losing money to errors and manual processes. It matters for technology adoption because a single connected system is easier for agents to use than a patchwork of disconnected tools.
You do not have to change how your agents find clients or market themselves. TotalBrokerage handles the operational backbone. Keep your CRM, keep your marketing tools. We handle the part that tracks the money and keeps you compliant.
If you want to see what that looks like for your brokerage, book a demo.
About this survey
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. Respondents were asked to select their top three concerns from a predefined list. The data in this post reflects those selections.
FAQ
What are the biggest concerns for real estate brokerage leaders in 2023?
According to the 2023 State of Real Estate Brokerage Technology Survey by TotalBrokerage in collaboration with T3 Sixty, the top three concerns are rising interest rates (48.91%), lack of housing supply (46.74%), and recruiting top performing agents (43.48%). Reduced profit margins (34.78%) and agent adoption of technology (29.35%) also ranked high among the 92 brokerage leaders surveyed.
Why is agent recruiting such a big concern for brokerages?
Recruiting ranked third overall, selected by 43.48% of respondents. In a tight market, the agents closing deals are valuable to every brokerage in town. Retaining and attracting those agents depends heavily on the operational experience you provide: accurate commissions, timely payments, clean reporting, and minimal administrative friction. Brokerages with manual, error-prone back offices lose agents to competitors that run smoother operations.
How do reduced profit margins connect to brokerage operations?
Margin erosion in a brokerage typically comes from accumulated waste rather than a single cost center. Commission calculation errors, labor hours spent on manual compliance reviews, slow and inaccurate reporting, and reconciliation work across disconnected systems all add up. The 34.78% of leaders who flagged profit margins as a top concern are often dealing with these kinds of operational drains rather than one obvious budget problem.
What can brokerages actually control on this list of concerns?
Interest rates and housing supply are market forces. You cannot influence them. But recruiting (43.48%), reduced profit margins (34.78%), agent adoption of technology (29.35%), and finding ways to reduce expenses (19.57%) are all directly tied to how your brokerage operates. Improving your back office systems, commission accuracy, and reporting capabilities gives you direct leverage over those concerns.
How does back office technology help with agent retention?
Agents care about getting paid correctly and on time, having visibility into their own production, and not being bogged down by administrative work. A brokerage with a connected back-office platform that handles commissions, compliance, and reporting in one place creates a better working environment. That operational quality becomes a recruiting and retention advantage because agents notice when things run well, and they definitely notice when things do not.
How was this survey conducted?
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. The survey covered technology usage, spending, concerns, satisfaction, adoption, and wish lists across the residential real estate brokerage industry.
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