The 72% Problem: Why Real Estate Brokers Are Drowning in Admin

The call came on a Thursday evening. My best broker — nearly 20 years working together, hundreds of deals closed — told me he was done.

Not leaving for a competitor. Not chasing a bigger split. He was quitting the business entirely.

“Jörg, I became a broker to sell properties. I spend my days filling out reports nobody reads.”

I was too exhausted to argue because I knew he was right.

What is the 72% Problem?

Roughly 72% of a broker’s working time now goes to tasks that have nothing to do with selling. CRM updates. Pipeline reports. Activity logs. Compliance checklists. Weekly summaries for managers who glance at them once and file them away. That number isn’t a guess — it’s what I saw across my own brokerage over nearly 15 years of tracking where time actually went.

Think about that for a moment. You hire someone because they’re brilliant at reading people, understanding neighborhoods, and closing deals. Then you hand them a laptop and tell them to spend three-quarters of their week typing into fields.

We took closers and turned them into data entry clerks.

How did we get here?

The short answer: we bought software built for the wrong person. Every major CRM in real estate was designed to satisfy the person who signs the purchase order — the team lead, the franchise owner, the regional director. Not the broker who has to use it eight hours a day.

That’s how you end up with tools that are brilliant at generating reports and terrible at helping someone actually sell a house. The manager gets a color-coded funnel chart. The broker gets another 40 minutes of mandatory logging before they can go home.

I built this machine myself. I’m not pointing fingers at some faceless corporation. When I was running Assetgate — a real estate brokerage I grew in Germany over many years — I added reporting layers with good intentions. Every dashboard was supposed to help. Every required field was supposed to improve data quality.

What actually happened: my best people got slower. Their energy drained into admin. The ones who stayed adapted by gaming the system — entering the minimum to keep management happy, which made the data worthless anyway. And the ones who couldn’t stomach it? They left. Like my Thursday evening caller.

Does more tracking actually mean better results?

No. And I’ll tell you exactly why.

Dashboard culture is surveillance culture. The moment a broker feels they’re being watched rather than supported, something breaks. They stop thinking about the next client conversation and start thinking about how to make their numbers look right by Friday. The report becomes the product instead of the sale.

I watched this happen at scale. After I sold Assetgate to Intrum — a Swedish financial services company — the reporting requirements tripled overnight. Corporate needed standardized metrics across markets. Understandable from a boardroom perspective. Catastrophic on the ground floor.

Brokers who were closing 15, 18 deals a year dropped to single digits. Not because they forgot how to sell. Because they were spending Monday and Tuesday updating systems, Wednesday in status meetings about the systems, and only had Thursday and Friday to actually work with clients. And by Thursday, half their leads had gone cold.

CRMs track. Conversations close. That distinction matters more than any metric in your weekly report.

What happens when you remove the admin burden?

I saw this firsthand with one broker on my team — someone I’d nearly written off as a mid-performer. Solid but not spectacular. Around eight deals a year while everyone else averaged ten.

We ran an experiment. Gave him an assistant to handle all CRM entries, report generation, and status updates. He only had to do two things: talk to prospects and close deals.

In 12 months, he went from 6 closed transactions to 14. Not because he got smarter or worked longer hours. He was already good. He’d just been buried alive in admin. We freed up 25 hours a week and he filled them with the one thing that actually generates revenue: having conversations with people who want to sell their homes.

That’s not an outlier story. That’s what happens whenever you let a closer do what closers do.

Why hasn’t PropTech fixed this already?

Because there’s more money in selling analytics to managers than in making brokers faster. It sounds cynical. It’s also true.

The incentive structure is backwards. The buyer of the software (management) wants visibility and control. The user of the software (the broker) wants speed and simplicity. These goals are in direct conflict, and the buyer always wins. So the industry keeps building heavier, more complex systems with more fields, more workflows, more automations that ironically create more work than they save.

I pitched 10 investors when I started Leon & Vera. Every single one asked the same question: “What analytics does the manager get?” Not one asked: “How much time does the broker save?”

All 10 said no. I think that tells you everything about how the industry thinks about brokers.

So I bet my own money — the exit from Assetgate — on a different thesis. Build for the person who actually does the work. Built for closers, not for supervisors. Make the broker faster, not the reporting prettier.

Is the broker shortage real, or are we just burning people out?

Every market I look at — Germany, Spain, Latin America — is complaining about a broker shortage. Can’t find good people. Can’t retain them. Younger generation doesn’t want the job.

I don’t think we have a shortage. I think we have a tolerance problem. We’re asking talented salespeople to accept a job where the selling is the smallest part. The best ones do the math, realize they’re spending 30 hours a week on activities that don’t earn them a single euro, and leave. Just like my Thursday evening caller.

The brokers who stay are the ones who either don’t know any better or have built such large books of business that they can absorb the inefficiency. But even they’re frustrated. I talk to brokers across Europe every week. The number one complaint isn’t commission splits, market conditions, or competition. It’s “I don’t have time to do my actual job.”

That’s not a staffing problem. That’s a systems problem. And systems problems have solutions.

Where do we go from here?

I started Leon & Vera with one mission: make sure no one else loses their best broker to a spreadsheet. That sounds simple. It isn’t. It requires rethinking how broker tools should work from the ground up — not adding a chatbot to an existing CRM, not building another reporting layer with a friendlier interface.

It means starting with a question nobody in PropTech seems to ask: what does the broker actually need in front of them at 9 AM on Tuesday to close more deals this month?

The answer is never a dashboard. It’s never a 47-field contact form. It’s never a weekly pipeline review template.

It’s the next conversation. The right person to call. The context to make that call count. Everything else is overhead.

The 72% Problem isn’t a statistic I enjoy sharing. I built some of that problem myself over the years. But acknowledging it is step one. Step two is refusing to accept it. Step three is building something that actually respects the broker’s time.

That Thursday evening phone call cost me my best broker. It also gave me the clearest product brief I’ve ever received: stop making us do work that doesn’t matter.

I’m still working on the answer. But I know this much — the next generation of broker tools will be judged by one metric only: how much of that 72% they eliminate. Everything else is noise.