Epique Realty CEO Josh Miller offers 3-point fix for agent tech adoption

Josh Miller, CEO and co-founder of Epique Realty, told attendees at Tuesday’s HousingWire AI Summit that the real estate industry’s most expensive technology investments are often the least used. He offered a three-part prescription to solve the problem.

Brokerages spend thousands of dollars on tools their agents refuse to adopt, and the solution lies not in building more technology but in aligning offerings with what agents already want, already pay for or have a real incentive to use, Miller said.

“As a nerd with a real estate license, I’ve noticed some really interesting things in our industry,” he told the crowd. “And one of those things that I first noticed when we opened our real estate brokerage was that almost every single broker in this room has spent thousands of dollars on technology that your agents just refuse to use.”

Miller co-founded Epique Realty in December 2021 after becoming disillusioned with the traditional brokerage model, he said.

“We were really frustrated with the industry and the way that it kind of worked for agents — feeling like we were doing 100% of the work and getting 50% of the money, right?” he said. “So it just didn’t feel right to us, as agents, that we didn’t have any benefits. We didn’t have any help, not many things to help us build our business.”

The brokerage has expanded rapidly in recent years — climbing to No. 16 among brands on the RealTrends Verified rankings for transaction sides in 2025. The company recorded $7 billion in sales volume across 23,000 sides last year.

Epique has grown to house roughly 5,000 agents across all 50 states and three countries, Miller added.

He announced from the stage that the company debuted at No. 7 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list, ranking as the fastest-growing real estate brokerage in America.

“We have not bought a single brokerage. We have not done anything at all. We spent zero dollars on it,” Miller said. “It’s just organic growth, agents telling agents. In fact, we’re the only national brokerage with no [vice president] of growth, no growth director, no growth committee. Now we have a retention director and a retention committee, but we have nothing focused on growth.”

The adoption problem

Miller cited National Association of Realtors data showing that when agents aren’t forced to use a particular tool, they gravitate toward e-signatures (79%), social media (75%), photography and video (52%), and AI-generated content (46%) — not the expensive CRMs that brokerages typically push.

“Seventy percent of brokerages offer a CRM,” he said. “Thirty percent of agents don’t use one at all. They probably don’t even know what CRM stands for. Thirty percent pay for their own instead, and only 15% of them log in weekly. This is really abysmal for probably your most expensive thing that you offer.”

By contrast, Miller said Epique’s CRM adoption rate stands at 89% — more than triple the industry average. The reason is simple, he said, as it gives agents something they wanted.

“In 2025, we gave 1.25 million leads to our agents,” Miller said. “And they were free. And you know where we put them? Lofty. If you don’t log into Lofty, you don’t get them. And so naturally, they wanted the free leads.”

These leads generated $4.3 million in gross commission income for Epique agents last year, Miller said.

Miller narrowed down his strategy into three conditions for getting agents to use technology: They already want it, they’re already paying for it on their own and they have real incentive to use it.

He urged brokers to evaluate their tech stacks against the tools agents actually use and detailed the thought that went into creating Epique’s internal AI tools.

“It actually started with an Instagram post that I wanted to make but could not think of a good caption,” Miller said following his session. “Even though my background is marketing, you get home and there’s just no tools to do [exactly what you want], so I was already delving into AI.

“I created this AI that did [what I wanted]. That was the first one. It was an AI that lived on my computer.”

AI as a tool, not a buzzword

Miller acknowledged that the technology has become the industry’s dominant buzzword — but warned that agents still risk repeating past tech adoption failures.

“According to HousingWire, 98% of brokerages now say AI is being adopted by their firm in the next year,” Miller said. “So it’s not that there is a brokerage AI adoption problem. Brokerage AI adoption isn’t the problem — it’s agent adoption.”

He encouraged brokers to use modern development tools like Lovable and Claude to build internal and external applications quickly — but only if the tools meet the three conditions for adoption.

“If you’re going to go in and you’re going to build something amazing, you should build it internally for things like onboarding, externally for your agents,” Miller said. “Just make sure that your agents want it; they maybe already pay for it, or would pay for it or have a clear incentive to use it.”