For most brokerages, getting a deal from contract to close still means doing some of the work twice.
That’s a central finding of the first quarterly benchmark report from Side and Inman. Among 40 broker-owners who completed Side’s Brokerage Ops Score self-assessment between Sept. 10 and Oct. 8, just over two-thirds said at least two of every 10 transaction files come back for correction. Thirty percent said threhttps://www.inman.com/2026/10/21/most-broker-owne…e-back-for-fixes/e or more do. Only a quarter said zero or one.
The report, the first in a quarterly series, grows out of a partnership announced at Inman Connect San Diego in July, when Inman named Side a founding partner of Inman 2.0. At the time, Side CEO Guy Gal said one goal was to help independent brokerage owners benchmark their performance against peers.
Roughly two-thirds of respondents said they spend at least 20 percent of their own time on operations, and 28 percent said it’s more than 40 percent. Yet 73 percent said they could double transaction volume with no added support or only minor additions — confidence the report suggests is worth testing.
Steven Price, Side’s vice president of product, said the breakdown usually isn’t at closing. It occurs at the handoff, right after the contract is signed, when a file moves from an agent focused on the client to a back office focused on the record.
That’s when a missed disclosure, a mismatched ownership type or an inconsistent commission split slips through, Price said. Catching it later can mean asking the client to sign documents again.
His fix starts at intake: capturing the core facts of a deal once, as structured data; by knowing everything a file will need upfront based on the deal type and market; and by settling who gets paid, and how much, from day one.
Price recommended broker-owners track four measures: first-pass rate, how often staff have to step in on a file, time from closing to agent payment, and how often compliance or money problems surface late in a deal.
People still matter
The report pairs the data with an essay by Jonathan Peterson, managing partner of Ember Advisory Group, who argues that brokerages risk mistaking understaffing for efficiency as automation and AI absorb more back-office work.
Technology should take over routine tasks, Peterson writes. But deciding what to automate — and what still requires human judgment — is what separates running lean from running short-handed.
Price drew a similar line. Side automates tasks with a knowable right answer, such as pulling data from documents or flagging paperwork that doesn’t match, he said, while leaving unusual deal structures and calls that put a broker’s license on the line to people.
The findings are self-reported and come from the first 40 broker-owners to take an assessment built by Side, which provides back office services to brokerages. The sample isn’t designed to represent the industry as a whole.
Side runs the back office for more than 600 real estate companies, and in July opened its SideOS platform to independent and franchise-affiliated brokerages outside its network.
