Trends 2026: Why Real has quickly outpaced its peers
The national brokerage platform model has allowed some firms to scale at an exceptional pace. Get a glimpse of how — and why — it has worked so well for Real.
Editor's note: Since 2006, the Swanepoel Trends Report has provided in-depth research and analysis to help leaders understand the forces shaping residential real estate. This exclusive series of excerpts highlights each trend featured in the 2026 report, which was released in November 2025.
The Rise of the National Brokerage Platform: While the traditional brokerage model is still going strong, its dominance has waned as national brokerage platforms have taken off. The platform model has enabled firms to scale quickly via organic growth (not franchises) by leveraging technology, efficiency and cloud-based operations.
The following excerpt, taken from T3 Sixty's 2026 Trends Report, profiles The Real Brokerage — a prime example of how this model can spur massive growth.
Inside Real
Chairman and CEO Tamir Poleg and his co-founders launched Real in 2014 with the explicit intention of using technology and efficiency to establish and scale a real estate company that could quickly and effectively compete with other brokerages. They saw an opportunity to marry real estate and a national, scaled brokerage platform to disrupt the traditional model. Real aimed to give agents a quality, affordable alternative.
Real has vastly outperformed the industry in recent years. From 2022 to 2024, it more than tripled its US sales volume; in the same period, only one of the top 10 brokerages in 2025 achieved growth — Compass, at 1.3 percent.
From 2022 to 2024, the company nearly tripled its annual US sales volume from $12.1 billion to $42.4 billion with 90,298 US sides and 24,140 agents, according to T3 Sixty's Mega 1000. This makes it the US's fifth largest brokerage by sales volume in 2025.
The Real platform
At the centerpiece of Real lies its back-end platform called ReZen. It features the following:
End-to-end transaction management: Allows teams, brokers and agents to communicate, process deals, manage commissions and direct payments.
Automated compliance and brokerage oversight: Reduces manual workload and supports compliance and transaction status visibility in real time.
Integrated payment and financial services: Provides commission disbursement and access to financial tools.
Leo CoPilot: Features an embedded AI-powered agent support tool that tracks and automates many processes within it.
Customizable team tools: Including the ability to manage teams, customize compensation plans for agents on teams, manage teams within the larger team and manage individual compensation plans, including those that vary from Real's base model.
One of the key reasons the tech platform enables incredible efficiencies is that 100 percent of Real agents use it to track, process, coordinate and manage all their transactions. The firm tracks and pays agents exclusively through it, thus achieving full adoption — an incredibly valuable and rare reality for brokerage technology.
The platform, built from the ground up by Real, includes an organized presentation of all deals with relevant digital files attached (via Dropbox-like file-management features) and conversations (via a Slack-like interface) organized for each transaction. Real's AI tool Leo automatically reviews files upon submission and flags potential issues for manual review.
By September 2025, Real had mapped transaction documents for AI-enabled review in about 40 percent of its markets. In those areas, Chief Technology Officer Pritesh Damani says that error detection has achieved remarkable accuracy. By the end of 2025, it plans to have mapped all its transaction documents across all its markets.
On the platform, agents also gain real-time visibility into their financial details with the company through the Real Wallet section. Upon logging in, they see a dashboard of their entire business at Real, including:
Monthly income and progress toward cap
Commission, equity, and revenue-share earnings
Revenue-share uplines and downlines
Active, closed and terminated transactions
Funds available for borrowing from Real
For example, when they click on an active transaction, they see a snapshot of the deal, including transaction timeline, status, payments, conversations among real agents and brokers, files and any alerts about issues or immediate next steps required.
Agents can also slice and dice the Real Wallet data by transaction, time period and in other ways.
Read the full chapter: Digital and printed copies of the 2026 Swanepoel Trends Report are available for purchase at T3 Trends.
Real Estate News is an editorially independent division of T3 Sixty.