Is tech debt ruining your brokerage performance?
If you’ve never heard of tech debt, you’re not alone. Tech debt happens when you implement systems that work in the short term but drag your brokerage down in the long term. When left unchecked, tech debt can stall growth and undermine brokerage performance.
Wondering what exactly tech debt is – and how you can fix it? We’ll cover everything you need to know about tech debt, how it hurts brokerage performance, and what you can do to fix it. To start, here’s a look at what tech debt is.
Tech debt is a term that originates in computer programming. For that use case, tech debt is messy code that solves a problem quickly in the short term – but creates problems in the long term.
In terms of your brokerage, tech debt is adopting solutions that are useful now but cause problems in the future. For example, you might choose a separate solution for transaction management, accounting, and reporting and analytics. Each of those tech tools solves a problem right now – like wasting time on manual transaction management or accounting.
However, implementing a bunch of stand-alone tools will eventually cause problems for your brokerage. A huge tech stack is hard to use, expensive, and can be more time-consuming than manual back office management. Because of tech debt, you no longer get benefits from your tech stack – only headaches.
Now that you know what tech debt is, you might be wondering how it can hurt brokerage performance. Here are the top 3 ways tech debt can sabotage your brokerage performance:
The first way tech debt can reduce brokerage performance is by wasting time.
With tech debt, you have a lot of different tech tools to manage your front and back office. Your team has to spend time learning each tech tool. Once they know how to use your tech tools, your team then has to spend time moving data between all your systems (like transaction data to your accounting tool).
By spending so much time just trying to get your tech to work, your team has less time to spend on brokerage growth activities. Instead of focusing on managing more transactions or finding ways to increase profitability, your team has to fight with your tech – hurting your brokerage growth and performance.
Another way tech debt can ruin brokerage performance is by reducing efficiency.
With tech debt, your team has to manage your front and back office with a variety of siloed tech tools. As such, your team has to manually find, enter, and transfer data between transaction management, accounting, agent management, commissions, and more. This manual data management is a huge time suck for your team.
Because your team has to spend so much time on manual data management, your back office team gets less done every day. This reduced efficiency makes it hard for your team to handle a larger transaction volume – hurting brokerage growth and performance.
Along with reducing efficiency, tech debt can ruin brokerage performance by making it difficult to hire and retain top producers.
Tech debt slows down your entire brokerage. As such, agents have to spend more time doing even simple tasks (like generating documents, comparing offers, and communicating with clients). This limits how many deals your agents can close – stopping agents from reaching their full potential.
And, tech debt can also slow down agent payments. Instead of getting paid next day, your agents may have to wait weeks (or even months) to be paid. Because your tech limits their growth and slows payments, your top agents might leave for a brokerage with less tech debt. Your brokerage might also struggle with hiring new agents for the same reasons.
Without your top performers and new agents, your brokerage performance and growth will tank.
Tech debt can sabotage brokerage growth and performance. But, if you have tech debt that’s holding back your brokerage, how can you fix it?
The best way to fix tech debt is to implement new systems that will work just as well in five years as they do today. To do that, you should look for a complete front and back office platform. By choosing a complete platform, you can shrink your tech stack to only one or two solutions – dramatically reducing your tech debt.
Along with choosing complete platforms, you can also fix tech debt by making sure your front and back office platforms have wide third-party integration. That way, if you do need to add additional tech (like QuickBooks or franchise software), your front and back office platforms can seamlessly transfer data to and from these outside tech tools.
With complete front and back office platforms with wide third-party integration, you can dramatically reduce tech debt to boost brokerage performance and growth.
Tech debt itself is hard to notice, but the problems it causes are not. Reduced efficiency, low productivity, difficulty hiring top talent, stalled brokerage growth, and more can all be symptoms of tech debt.
To fix tech debt and maximize brokerage performance, you should look for brokerage tech that can adapt and change with your brokerage. This tech should be a complete front or back office platform with wide third-party solution integration. By choosing the right tech now, you can set your brokerage up for success in the short and long term.
If you’re looking for the best front and back office platforms to reduce tech debt and boost performance, BoomTown and Brokermint are the way to go. BoomTown is a complete front office platform. With predictive CRM, lead generation, custom websites, a mobile app, and more, BoomTown has everything you need to maximize front office performance.
Brokermint’s complete, cloud-based back office platform has what you need to tackle tech debt in your back office. As a modular platform, you can choose which modules you need now – with the option to add more as you grow. That way, you won’t have to adopt new tech systems that create tech debt as you grow.
With five modules (transaction management, commission automation, accounting, agent management, and reporting/analytics), Brokermint had everything you need to streamline and modernize your back office.
Book your BoomTown and Brokermint demos today to see how you can reduce tech debt to boost brokerage performance.
Schedule a demo and see your back office with Brokermint.
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