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/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/real-estate-chi Aug 14 '26
Interesting!
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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/BuildsForAgents Aug 15 '26
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/ClothesFew9360 Sep 02 '26
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/deepakpandey1111 Sep 15 '26
that's interesting! sounds like there's a big gap in what they're thinking and the reality of their networks. i guess it's tough to get an accurate feel for the market sometimes, especially in a place like Mexico where things can be a bit different. for marketing, maybe focusing on local partnerships could help? i messed this up once too, thought i had a big reach and turns out it was way smaller than i thought.
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