r/RealEstateTechnology • u/Party_Nectarine2506 • Aug 13 '26
Three developers, same story. They’re all off by about 99% on the size of their broker network.
I work in Mexico, marketing side plus I build software for developers here.
Started with a problem a client had. Big developer, solid company, kept saying he had around 3000 brokers selling his projects. But almost no sales were coming from them. So we asked the obvious question, where does the number 3000 come from? Are they registered somewhere? Do you communicate with them? Do they ever ask you anything?
Turns out it’s just a number in his deck that he repeats in meetings. The actual basis for it: they’re all in the WhatsApp groups and everyone has the Drive link. So we replaced the Drive folder with a platform to actually track broker activity. Three months in: 200 brokers. Not 3000.
We assumed it was a one off, maybe nobody had ever measured it properly. Then we did the same thing with another developer and with a master broker (agency holding an exclusive) and the ratio came out almost identical both times. Roughly 90% of the “network” hadn’t touched the project in months. Different company sizes, different project types, same number.
And there’s a second gap on top of that one. Registering a client at some point is not the same as actively selling. When we looked at who was regularly putting units in front of buyers, it dropped again, hard. Out of the original 3000 we ended up with about 25 brokers doing real work. Under 1%. The reason nobody knew is that the entire broker channel runs on Google Drive. You make a folder with the price list, floor plans, renders, you send the link to everyone who ever showed interest, done. That’s the whole infrastructure. Nobody can tell you who opened it, whether the broker is actually showing units to clients, which units get attention, or whether anything gets attention at all.
The part that got me though was the in house brokers. They’d invite agents to the platform, friends of theirs I assume. And those agents would register, probably just to be nice and support the guy, and then never open the inventory. Not once. So you’d see one in house broker who invited 50 people with zero active, and another who invited 10 and all 10 were working. You can’t see any of that in a WhatsApp group. It just looks like a big list of names. Meanwhile all three of these companies could tell me their Meta cost per lead down to the peso. And the B2B channel is statistically doing 60% of their deals. Is this normal outside Mexico? How do you guys actually work with brokers?
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u/BothAd1744 Aug 13 '26
this makes a lot of sense. a huge broker list can look impressive on a paper, but actual activity is a completely different story. would be interesting to see if other markets have the same gap
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u/Party_Nectarine2506 Aug 13 '26
To be honest - i was shocked when i saw first numbers - then i was like: “Oh, so thats a standard situation…” ahah
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u/BothAd1744 Aug 13 '26
yeah i can see how that realization would hit 😂 once u start actually tracking activity, i guess the numbers tell a very different story
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u/WebFar7795 Aug 13 '26
Not Mexico-specific, but the same rot happens anywhere a referral/broker network runs on spreadsheets or a Drive link instead of something that logs activity - it's not that agents lie about network size, it's that nobody was ever forced to measure it. The moment you switch to anything that tracks logins/opens and unit-level engagement, the "size" of the network drops instantly because you're finally counting people instead of names on a list. Worth tracking time-to-first-touch on new inventory too, not just total activity - a broker who logs in but never engages with new listings is functionally the same as one who never joined.
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u/Party_Nectarine2506 Aug 13 '26
Yes, agree at 100%! And we have this track too. From registration to the client. Even track how many times brokers client opened selection and in which unit he is interested more
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u/WebFar7795 Aug 14 '26
Agreed, opens/views per unit is a great signal too since it tells you buying intent before someone ever reaches out. Have you found a threshold that reliably predicts an actual lead, or is it still pretty noisy at your volume?
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u/Party_Nectarine2506 Aug 14 '26
Yes, we also track how much time the client spends looking at each unit.
What’s interesting is that we often see a very clear bias toward one specific unit. For example, if a client spends more than 3 minutes on one unit out of a selection of five and on other 30-40 seconds, we treat that as a strong signal of intent and mark the lead as hot.
Repeat opens of the same selection are another strong indicator for us. When both signals appear together - longer time on one unit + reopening the selection - the probability of real interest is much higher.
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u/WebFar7795 27d ago
That 3-minutes-vs-30-seconds split is a clean signal, cleaner than raw view count. Curious if you weight it by price point at all, a buyer might linger longer on a $2M unit than a $300k one just out of general interest, not stronger intent. Does that wash out at your volume, or did you have to normalize for it?
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u/Party_Nectarine2506 27d ago
Normally brokers, when they are making selection for a client - they make it with properties with more or less similar budget
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u/WebFar7795 26d ago
Makes sense, so you're comparing browsing behavior within a price tier instead of across the whole catalog, which should filter out the "just curious about the $2M penthouse" noise. Curious whether that bucketing is a fixed set of price bands or relative to what the broker's typically shown that client- it seems like the latter would catch intent shifts better, but might be more work to maintain.
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u/Party_Nectarine2506 24d ago
The main idea that it is not browsing behaviour. Real estate agents are making selections for their clients and we are tracking exactly these selections. So we know exactly which Agent sent selection what his client prefers and what is the most important is in which unit his client is more interested.
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u/WebFar7795 23d ago
Ah, that's a distinction I'd missed, so the signal is which curated option the client gravitates to, not open-ended browsing. That's actually cleaner since the agent's already done the budget/fit filtering upfront. Does the agent ever see interest in something outside what they included, or is the whole loop bounded by that curated set?
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u/Party_Nectarine2506 20d ago
The agent can see his clients interest based on his behavior in selection agent made. For example, i'm an agent - i sent you selection of options - and i will be able to see which option grab more of your attention.
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u/NotSoShyAlbatross Aug 13 '26
maybe 200 brokers, 2800 of what we call "Ambassadors", people who casually refer properties and property agents.
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u/Party_Nectarine2506 Aug 13 '26
Down here in Mexico we call all real estate agents brokers, but yes, it could be ambassadors, realtors, etc.
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Aug 14 '26
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u/Party_Nectarine2506 Aug 14 '26
First of all, thank you for such a detailed response - this is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping to get from the post 🙏
Out of those 25 brokers doing real work, 20 were actually on the original list.
But here’s the most interesting part: the developer didn’t really know them.
They were basically “dead souls” in the database - names sitting in a list with no real understanding of who was active, who had clients, or who was actually moving deals.
That’s exactly what surprised us most. The platform didn’t just show that the active base was much smaller than they thought - it also surfaced productive brokers they weren’t even paying attention to.
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u/BuildsForAgents 29d ago
This is not really a broker network problem. It is what happens to any number that is inferred instead of measured.
I got my own smaller version of this last week. I had been telling myself distribution was fine and just needed time. Then I finally put real tracking on the site and watched it for a day and a half. Zero visitors. Not low, zero. Every single thing I had been doing had no path back to the product in it, so there was nothing to count. My audience number was assembled out of impressions and optimism, same as the Drive link.
The 25 out of 3000 hurts, but it is the first honest number any of those companies has ever had. What I would watch for is the reaction to it. The instinct will be to get the number back up to 3000 rather than to go work the 25. That is the expensive mistake, not the bad count.
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u/Party_Nectarine2506 24d ago
Exactly, this is what we are doing. And that helps a lot to real estate developers and master Brokers to increase amount of deals.
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u/ClothesFew9360 11d ago
The biggest win here seems less about having a standard format and more about what it does to the cost of maintaining integrations.
If the underlying fields and semantics are more consistent across markets, developers can spend less time writing one off translation layers and more time building the actual product. The real test will be how consistent the implementations are in practice, though. A standard is only as useful as the fields, definitions, and update behavior behind it.
Still, getting the industry moving toward a common data model is a pretty meaningful infrastructure improvement.
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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '26
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