According to HousingWire, Josh Miller, the CEO of Epique Realty, recently spoke at the HousingWire AI Summit about a problem he sees across the real estate industry. Brokerages are spending significant money on technology that their agents simply won't use. Miller explained that the solution isn't to build more tools, but rather to focus on tools that agents already want, are already paying for themselves, or have a genuine reason to use.
Miller founded Epique Realty a few years back because he felt frustrated with how traditional brokerages operated. He and his co-founders believed agents were doing most of the work but not getting the support they needed. Since then, Epique has grown substantially. The company now has roughly five thousand agents spread across all fifty states and three countries, and it recently ranked as the fastest-growing real estate brokerage in America. Impressively, all this growth came through word of mouth between agents, with zero acquisitions or traditional marketing efforts.
To illustrate his point about technology adoption, Miller referenced data showing what agents actually use when brokerages don't mandate it. Agents gravitate toward e-signatures, social media, photography and video, and AI-generated content tools. Meanwhile, seventy percent of brokerages offer CRM software, yet only a small percentage of agents actually use them regularly. Miller pointed out that Epique achieved an eighty-nine percent CRM adoption rate by connecting their system directly to something agents wanted, free leads that were only accessible through logging in.
Miller narrowed his approach down to three specific conditions for successful technology adoption. First, agents already want the tool. Second, they're already paying for it on their own dime. Third, they have a clear incentive to use it. He explained that Epique's internal AI tools were born from practical needs, starting with something as simple as needing help writing social media captions. Miller cautioned the industry that while almost every brokerage claims to be adopting AI, the real challenge isn't getting brokerages to use these tools, it's getting individual agents to use them.
What I am seeing locally here in the Bay Area and across the East Bay is that agents are increasingly skeptical of brokerage mandates around technology. The agents I work with every day want tools that solve real problems they face, not software that looks good on a PowerPoint presentation at the corporate office. Miller's insight about tying adoption to incentives resonates with what I observe in our market. The brokerages winning agent loyalty are the ones listening to what their producers actually need and building around that, rather than forcing expensive solutions from the top down.
