Pricing is Never Easy (Transmission #354 Part I)

WRITTEN BY: PIERRE CALZADILLA

[Adapted from Pricing Models and Negotiating Tips for Brokers & Vendors in Real Estate]

Determining the best way to price your product is a required skill for every founder, especially as a vendor approaching the real estate industry. Having done this a few times for various levels of the industry (and as a buyer from the broker side), either at Trulia, RealScout, LocalLogic, or now Upfront, it’s always a fun conversation to dig into the complexity of pricing. As a sales leader for over twenty years and having spoken to hundreds of founders in my career, it would have been infinitely valuable if someone explained all the models long ago. Hopefully, the below overview will help both brokerage leaders and their vendors arrive at better conclusions on pricing. 

I don’t profess that this is perfect, or even all-inclusive, but it’s a starting point and definitely grounded in real world experience selling enterprise across the real estate sector coast to coast.

It’s worth mentioning that I wrote this originally a few years ago, and edited it as the times evolved. This latest iteration now has updates for AI products, and a “2026 Update” to each section. 

Price models, as much as value propositions, can be the reason a brokerage doesn’t purchase necessary tech, or the reason a start-up fails. On both ends, there are things to weigh. Pricing in real estate tech has taken many flavors. My goal with this post is to help with many negotiations —and hopefully save people and their companies from wasting valuable time.

Here are several models for pricing products to brokerages. The approaches outlined below are positioned towards enterprise sales. However, in some cases, it may resonate for pricing for direct sales to agents.

Pricing By Agent (license/user):

• What is it: Pricing based on total agent count. Usually seen with software or SaaS businesses like a CRM, etc.
• Pitfalls: The 80/20 rule is alive and well in real estate. This pricing model makes it very difficult for brokers with already thin margins to provide good tech to their team. For example, a broker with 100 agents, on average, only has 20 or maybe 30 agents that are truly profitable contributors that incentivize the broker to provide more tools. Yet these are the same agents who are “capped out” or on high splits. A broker may opt out of technology they need because this pricing model is unfriendly to their business model. Other things to consider are part-time agents, or agents on the “books” that don’t sell, like assistants. Makes for messy bookkeeping and difficult negotiations with the buyer.
• Best Practices: In fact, pricing by agent works best in full service, higher split brokerages, or brokers that charge monthly recurring fees (desk, marketing, etc). This allows the broker to be a partner and add value to the agent relationship. For some companies, I have provided licenses to all users, while discounting the “working/active” agent count, OR have priced only on transacting agents and given newer/non-transacting agents software for free (at times with a limited service).
• 2026 update: More companies are pricing based on the adoption count, and giving the rest of the service to all users (they have access) but not expecting usage. This allows every agent to get access, and it’s on the vendor to get adoption. There is a more balanced value exchange between the vendor and client in this model. Pricing by agent count also can lead to a lot of pricing fluctuations, which is not ideal for the vendor or the broker. If you go this route, I recommend a tiered pricing model, with 20% banding, i.e. 100 agent tier can grow to 120 before you change the price, and even then, maybe give them 90 days to sustain that growth before increasing the MRR. 

Pricing by Office