Insights from Inman Connect 2025: The Rise of the Brokerage-as-a-Platform
Last week at Inman Connect, I heard something that stopped me cold.
Clelia Warburg Peters—longtime proptech investor and one of the most perceptive voices in the industry—said:
“It doesn’t make sense to run a brokerage without ancillary services anymore.”
That one sentence perfectly captured the tectonic shift happening in real estate.
It’s not a prediction. It’s a statement of fact.
The old model is gone. What replaces it is already taking shape.
The Margins Are Gone
Transaction volume is down. Commission splits are razor-thin. Regulatory and legal pressures—especially the fallout from the NAR settlement—are shaking the foundations of the traditional model.
Brokerages that once thrived on agent headcount are finding that it's no longer enough. First membership has cratered (down from 1.6M licensed Realtors in 2022 to just 1.2M as of this writing). Second the agents that remain now demand more support, better tech, and keep a larger share of the commission. Meanwhile, consumers expect seamless digital experiences, integrated services, and transparent pricing.
It is in the midst of all of this that the CEO of Rocket—who recently acquired Redfin—shared a staggering goal:
Cut the average cost of a real estate transaction in half, from $40,000 to $20,000.
That’s not just a margin squeeze. That’s a total overhaul of the economics. And it raises the fundamental question:
Where does that lost revenue get recaptured?
Brokerages Are Becoming Holding Companies
The brokerages that are still thriving understand something fundamental: you can’t rely on commissions alone. You need to own more of the transaction.
Modern brokerage companies aren’t just places where agents hang their license. They’re holdcos—holding companies that deliver services around the transaction, not just through it.
Think title. Think mortgage. Think insurance. Think home services, warranty upsells, moving concierge. These are no longer "side hustles." They’re core to the revenue model.
And here’s where the Rocket stat becomes especially relevant:
The only way to sustainably offer a $20k transaction experience is to control multiple profit centers. The math doesn’t work otherwise. Brokerages that can vertically integrate and earn on every layer—rather than relying solely on commission splits—are the ones that will survive and thrive.
Increasingly, these services are bundled into the consumer experience—not just tacked on by agents.
That’s the big shift.
The Ancillary Stack: A Modern Brokerage’s Profit Engine
Let’s break it down:
Title & Escrow
Still one of the highest-margin pieces of the stack. If you’re not capturing title revenue, you’re leaving money on the table—often thousands of dollars per transaction.
Mortgage
Cross-sell mortgage and you can earn origination fees or referral fees. The top brokerages aren’t just recommending lenders—they’re integrating them directly into the buyer journey.
Insurance
Homeowners insurance is a natural upsell. Smart firms are embedding it into the closing process with licensed partners or in-house teams.
Home Services
From moving services to cleaning, landscaping, storage, and repairs—there’s real money in coordinating post-close logistics. Especially if you can earn a cut on every referral.
Data & Software
This one’s underrated. Brokers who build their own tech stack can not only improve agent efficiency—they can sell those tools externally, or monetize the underlying data.
You don’t need to launch all of these at once. But you do need to be thinking like a vertically integrated business.
The Stakes: Commodity vs. Platform
Here’s the hard truth:
If you're running a traditional brokerage and not building toward vertical integration, you're probably becoming a commodity onboarding service for agents—one that can be replaced when a better offer comes along.
But if you're building the stack? You become a platform. You own the consumer relationship. You drive recurring margin. You create defensibility.
What This Means for Proptech and Data Providers
For those of us in the proptech space—especially companies like ours that provide the infrastructure for real estate innovation—this shift is huge.
Brokerages are no longer just customers for CRMs or agent tools. They're building full-fledged software ecosystems. They need:
Flexible APIs
High-fidelity property data
Ownership verification
Valuation models
Comps and investor logic
Consumer-facing search and decision tools
The new breed of brokerage isn’t using software. They’re becoming software companies. If you’re building tools for this space, build for that reality.
Closing Thought: The Moment to Evolve Is Now
The market doesn’t care what a brokerage used to be. It only cares what it can become.
So the question isn’t whether to expand beyond commissions.
It’s whether you’re building a brand agents and consumers return to once—or a platform they return to forever.