Brokerage profitability rose in 2025 despite tepid home sales
A new report indicates that the share of profitable brokerages has steadily increased since 2023 — and among those operating in the red, losses have improved.
Key points:
- While home sales remained flat in 2025, an AccountTECH analysis of 157 brokerage firms found that nearly 70% were profitable last year, up from 56% in 2023.
- The findings are consistent with data showing improved performance (as measured by EBITDA) among all of the major publicly traded brokerages over that two-year period.
- AccountTECH attributed the trend to a sharper focus on cost-cutting, efficiency and productivity. “The industry is getting the memo — spend smarter or fall further behind.”
Home sales have faltered over the past few years, hitting multi-decade lows, so it would follow that more real estate brokerages would be struggling with profitably. But new research suggests the opposite is true.
AccountTECH's latest financial benchmarking study shows that real estate firms improved their financial performance in 2025 despite the continued slowdown in home sales. The analysis, which included 157 U.S. brokerages, found that nearly 70% of those firms were profitable last year — up from 56% in 2023 and 61% in 2024 — despite a slight decline in home sales during that period (4.09 million annual sales in 2023 vs. 4.06 million in 2025).
"This research shows a structural shift in the industry," according to the report. "The most important change isn't that top performers are dramatically more profitable — it's that fewer firms are losing money, and those losses are becoming smaller."
A closer look at the numbers
To measure profitability, the researchers used EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) as a benchmark — a metric that isolates core operating performance and allows for an apples-to-apples comparison across brokerage firms.
In 2025, roughly 30% of the companies analyzed were operating in the red, down from 44% in 2023. But more notably, according to AccountTECH, there were fewer firms reporting big losses, defined as a negative EBITDA exceeding 10%, and far more firms reporting positive EBITDA of 5% or higher compared to 2023.
The trends reflect a "clear structural improvement in industry profitability distribution" and an overall movement toward greater financial stability, the researchers concluded.
Consistent with public brokerage trends
While AccountTECH's analysis covered a broad swath of brokerage firms, it aligns with the publicly available financial results reported by some of the country's largest brokerage companies.
All of the major public brokerages — RE/MAX Holdings, Compass, Anywhere, eXp, The Real Brokerage, Douglas Elliman and Fathom Holdings — reported improved adjusted EBITDA in their most recent quarterly earnings reports compared to Q4 2023.
"The data indicates a broad-based improvement in financial outcomes across the industry rather than isolated gains among a small subset of firms," according to the AccountTECH report.
Brokerage leader optimism proved prescient
In early 2025, nearly two-thirds of the brokerage leaders who participated in an annual survey anticipated higher profits for the year — a big jump from 2024, when just 48% expressed such bullishness. The survey, conducted by Delta Media Group, included more than 100 brokerage leaders representing firms of all sizes.
That optimism, it seems, was self-fulfilling: While the housing market didn't end up rebounding in 2025 as some had hoped, brokerage firms were able to improve their financial performance by focusing on expenses, efficiency and agent productivity, according to AccountTECH's most recent Real Estate Brokerage Index from October 2025.
"Even money-losing firms appear to be responding to rising cost pressures and taking steps to curb expenses," the researchers suggested in the report published earlier this month. "Simply put, the industry is getting the memo — spend smarter or fall further behind."
Prioritizing agent quality over quantity
The report also highlighted the increase in EBITDA per agent as a telling indicator of "a dramatic improvement in efficiency and productivity."
"Non-producing agents still generate costs," the researchers noted. "Eliminating those expenses directly improves the bottom line."
The strategy of "offboarding" nonproductive agents was perhaps most notably employed by eXp beginning in late 2024, with Founder Glenn Sanford indicating a year later that the move was paying off. "There's still a lot of agents who weren't selling that much that are still somewhat churning out, but on a net productive basis I think our numbers are continuing to trend up," he told investors at the time.
With top-producing agents capturing an increasing share of listings, it will likely remain crucial for brokerages to invest their recruiting resources wisely if they hope to see profitability improvements continue.