For nearly two decades, brokerages have been sold on a simple promise: Buy one platform, centralize every workflow and eliminate the headache of juggling multiple vendors.
The reality has been far messier.
Many brokerages now find themselves paying for sprawling platforms whose most sophisticated features sit largely unused while agents subscribe to outside tools that better fit their daily workflow.
“Brokers say all the time, ‘I keep this because my agents love this part of it,’ or ‘It’s free, but it’s not the best,’” Constant Contact Senior Director of Vertical Integration Stephanie Alfonso said. “We really need to get away from settling.”
Stephanie Alfonso
Increasingly, industry leaders are asking, not “What platform does it all?” but “Which tools do each job best?” That shift allows brokers to build an ecosystem instead of buying a monolith.
The all-in-one promise ran into an adoption problem
The appeal of one login and one vendor is compelling for overwhelmed broker-owners and managing brokers, but implementation of all-in-one platforms often reveals that agents use only a fraction of available features.
“The best tool in the world doesn’t help an agent who never opens it,” eXp Realty COO Wendy Forsythe told me recently.
Increasingly, that gap between functionality and adoption has brokers rethinking their tech stack. “Brokers are not impressed with all the glitz and glam of a tool if their agents aren’t going to use it,” Alfonso said.
Feature count doesn’t always equal business value, and adoption, not functionality, is what determines ROI.
For example, “Most CRMs have email marketing,” Alfonso said, “but is it the best? No. It’s not what it’s built to be the best at.”
That’s why brokerages are increasingly replacing “good enough” bundled features with best-in-class tools. They’re aided, in part, by APIs and integrations that have matured significantly over the past few years.
Modern ecosystems eliminate much of the friction once associated with multiple vendors, allowing brokerages to curate technology instead of building everything themselves.
“I want to have the best design tool. I want to have the best transaction tool. I want to have the best marketing tool,” Alfonso said. “When they all work together, now you have an ecosystem.”
Forsythe said the shift isn’t about introducing more software. It’s about “giving agents a best-in-class tool that plugs into the systems they already rely on.”
Wendy Forsythe
How data is becoming the competitive advantage
As brokers increasingly look to automate portions of their team’s repetitive task work, systems are increasingly required to share data. Connected systems create smarter workflows, allowing information to move seamlessly instead of being trapped in silos.
“When the data’s all flowing together,” Alfonso said, “The right hand knows what the left hand is doing.”
“Agents don’t need more complexity,” Forsythe agreed. “They need automation that works in the background while they’re out in the field. What they actually need is fewer decisions and better outcomes.”
For proptech companies, success increasingly comes from integration rather than replacing competitors. Open tech ecosystems benefit users more than closed platforms. Witness the recent emphasis on integration from Rechat, Lone Wolf and MoxiWorks, among others.
Sometimes, it takes one customer to create an integration, as in the case of a recent Constant Contact customer who requested an integration with MAXA Designs. That resulted in a collaboration between the two companies that fit perfectly within the customer’s existing ecosystem, where MAXA customized the integration using Constant Contact’s open API.
On the brokerage side, providing better tech is also a recruiting advantage. Agents increasingly evaluate brokerage value through technology, not just commission splits, Alfonso said. “What do I not have to pay for because you provide it for me?”
Building an ecosystem, however, requires more than best-in-class software. Successful ecosystems require training, support and ongoing enablement, since implementation remains the biggest challenge for most brokerages, and both individual agents and larger organizations still fear large-scale change.
That creates an opening for vendors who, increasingly, differentiate themselves through partnership rather than products. “People don’t like change, even if it’s for the better,” Alfonso said. “It’s our responsibility to enable adoption.”
As the era of the everything platform fades, brokerages will assemble technology the same way they build high-performing teams: selecting specialists for each role and making sure they communicate effectively.
Look at your tech stack as a team, Alfonso said, where “everybody has their role, and they need to work together. You want to have the best people in that role possible. Same thing with tech.”
The goal isn’t owning every piece of technology anymore. It’s creating an ecosystem where every tool contributes to a connected, intuitive experience for agents — one that’s easy to adopt, flexible enough to evolve and strong enough to keep pace with an increasingly digital industry.
Troy Palmquist is the founder and principal at HomeCode Advisors. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
