The Issue of Big Data Brokerages Behind the Curve

The brokerage industry struggles to track big data about the primary area of their business. Time to change.

In working with numerous brokerage firms and both state and local associations of Realtors®, we’ve discovered that most of the large national firms, many regional brokerages and the National Association of Realtors® (NAR) are behind the curve in tracking necessary information about their brokerage affiliates or members, agents, and sales production. As our industry moves into the age of big data, it would seem that being able to track data about these basic areas of their business would cause each organization to focus resources in these areas.

Inaccuracies

How do we know that? When we collect data from brokerage firms and national branded organizations for our national agent rankings, it’s surprising that we have so many inaccuracies as to agent production, or which agents are individual or teams or the high number of duplicate entries we notice when proofing these studies. As far as NAR is concerned, it’s difficult for them to know, for instance, how many brokerage firms there are in the country. There are holes like this all over the Realtor® membership database.   

Time to Improve

It would seem that national and regional brokerage firms would want to focus their resources on tracking listings and sales and customer satisfaction— utterly understandable as their primary focus. But it would seem that data surrounding everything about agents would be highly critical. For NAR and the state and local affiliates, it would look that to have an accurate local, state and national membership database would be highly valuable. The tools for accessing and studying changes in that membership would be highly critical to understanding variations over time in the makeup of that membership.