Real estate’s consolidation wave is coming for proptech

Over the past 18 months, the real estate industry has experienced a massive wave of consolidation. From Rocket Companies and Redfin, The Real Brokerage and REMAX, to Compass International Holdings and Anywhere Real Estate, the industry has witnessed some of the largest companies become even larger through these M&A efforts. While other brokerages and the agents at the consolidating companies are certainly experiencing the impact of these moves, industry analysts believe they may not be the only ones. 

“Brokerage consolidation creates real risk for the large established proptech vendors at the top of the market, where there will be fewer buyers with greater negotiating leverage,” Russ Cofano, a co-founder of Alloy Advisors, said. “Consolidating firms will also likely have a corporate mandate to consolidate their technology platforms, creating a clear headwind for vendors.”

A recent example of this is Compass, which is in the middle of onboarding agents at owned-brokerage operations of Coldwell Banker, Corcoran and Sotheby’s International Realty on to its Home Platform. During the firm’s Q2 2026 earnings call in early August, Compass executives said the platform had been released to 4,000 of these agents and that the firm expects roughly 50,000 non-Compass agents to be on the platform, for a total of roughly 80,000 agents on the platform nationwide. Compass is planning to roll out the Home Platform to agents in its franchise network beginning in Q1 2027.

“The Home Platform is replacing the tech stacks these brokerages and franchises had previously, so the companies that serviced these brands and franchises will be impacted,” Victor Lund, the managing partner of WAV Group Consulting, said. “They are most likely losing major enterprise-level contracts. If you take away the agents that are now all part of these mega brokerages and other firms that have proprietary technology, the addressable market for these vendors is not very large.” 

Not a challenge, but an opportunity 

Dave Greenbaum, the chief customer officer for MoxiWorks, one of the technology vendors impacted by this wave of consolidation, told HousingWire that the trend is certainly one he and his company are watching, but they see it as an opportunity rather than a problem they need to solve. 

“The reality is, these mergers and acquisitions are happening, and they are going to affect you in different ways. You’re going to have scenarios where one of your customers is acquired by a company that either has their own proprietary tech or maybe they are using another tech provider in the space,” he said. “On the other end of the spectrum, you’re going to have clients that are acquiring other brokerages and it presents a really nice opportunity to expand your user base.”

Greenbaum added that MoxiWorks looks at consolidation as an opportunity to build bridges and foster new relationships with different firms or agents. It’s with this lens that Greenbaum sees great opportunities when one of their clients is acquired by a company with its own proprietary technology. 

“If we don’t already have a relationship with that company, we reach out and see what sorts of opportunities there are to integrate in a way that isn’t competing with what they’re offering, but gives their agents the best of both worlds,” says Greenbaum. “M&A is forcing technology decisions today, but what we’re seeing is that those decisions increasingly don’t have to be winner-take-all. There have always been three key stakeholders who need to see value from the system— the agent, the brokerage and the parent company or franchise. That hasn’t changed.”

To support these efforts, Greenbaum said MoxiWorks has evolved from being an all-in-one tech stack geared toward large enterprise clients to a vendor that now caters to all industry players, from large brokerages, to teams and even individual agents, allowing them to pick and choose the products and services they want. 

“Where prop tech companies can add value as consolidation plays out is by bringing technology to market that delivers for all three of those stakeholders, and gives each of them their own path to it,” Greenbaum said. “To do that well, and at scale, proptech companies across the board must be stronger at building a genuinely open ecosystem, this is what we are doing at MoxiWorks. People have talked about this for years, but it’s never going to matter more than it will over the next few years.”

Going with the flow

Like MoxiWorks, Jack Markham, the chief marketing officer of Inside Real Estate, said his firm also sees opportunities with brokerage consolidation. According to Markham, the largest threat posed by consolidation is the disruption it may cause agents. Due to this, he said Inside Real Estate is laser focused on reducing any potential disruptions these agents may experience. 

It’s with this in mind that Markham said Inside Real Estate decided to make a “big bet” launching its Streams Studio platform, which the company is currently rolling out. 

“Streams is a platform that is separate from [Inside Real Estate’s] BoldTrail that is designed to work underneath whatever tech stack the brokerage ends up with, including one that is proprietary to the brokerage they are acquired by. Streams is that constant underneath layer that allows them to take whatever they are using, the workflows they have, whatever data they have and keep those things working no matter what happens with their tech stack,” Markham said. “You can plug in any type of tool, any CRM and continue to run your business no matter what happens.” 

Streams also uses AI to provide agents with a list of time-sensitive tasks, such as urgent communications that require an immediate response, as well as behavioral signals from contacts in their database that they are interested in buying or selling. 

“We believe that an agnostic tool like Streams can unlock a lot of the utility in a CRM and drive more desirable outcomes,” Markham said. 

A new client base

While industry analysts are not as optimistic as the technology vendor executives, they do see some potential openings for these vendors. 

“Mid-sized brokerages will need enterprise-grade technology to compete with the consolidators. Independent proptech platforms can provide an important counterweight to the advantages of scale. Large teams with greater economic flexibility may prefer an independent, portable platform that they can control regardless of brokerage affiliation,” Cofano said. “For both mid-sized brokerages and large teams, these platforms can deliver many of the scale benefits of a national brokerage while allowing them to preserve their brand, control their data and maintain their strategic independence.”

Lund agrees, noting that the level of interconnectedness agents and brokers want from their technology tools so they function better with things like AI assistants, can only be achieved by brokerages with their own technology teams of third-party technology providers. 

“Smaller firms will have a hard time keeping up unless they partner with a great tech vendor, because they don’t have the capacity to have their own tech team build out proprietary technology,” Lund said. 

In Lund’s mind, these small to mid-sized regional brokerages will soon be many tech vendors’ main source of business because they enable these smaller firms to remain competitive with the large national brokerage companies.

Greenbaum said MoxiWorks has also identified this opening. 

“The proptech companies that survive will be the ones that give agents and brokerages real choice, not the ones trying to be the only choice,” Greenbaum said. “We can connect and plug into the ecosystems that result from these mergers and acquisitions, connect and flow data the right way and still sell directly to the mid-market, helping brokerages recruit and retain agents, while also giving agents a direct path to make their own buying decisions. That’s the mission we’re on at MoxiWorks.”

Not out of the woods

With AI making it easier for brokerages and agents to create their own technology, Amit Kulkarni, co-founder of Alloy Advisors, believes some of the vendors’ greatest challenges may still lie ahead. 

“Building products used to be time intensive and cost prohibitive, and today it isn’t. A brokerage can now get most of the way there with five engineers using AI instead of a large team, and for a company like Compass that already owns the bulk of its technology, that could be lucrative if they point it in the right direction,” Kulkarni said. “So that’s the real risk to enterprise proptech. Not that there’s consolidation in real estate, but that building this stuff simply isn’t that hard anymore, and most of what’s been built isn’t a strong enough moat to defend.”