BROKERAGE CASE STUDY
From Fragmented Data to Trusted Operational Reporting
How Montrato’s BUILD Framework connects business needs, data strategy, and implementation; and how a national real estate brokerage used it to improve operations
Starting a national real estate brokerage comes with many challenges. Among the many priorities there are recruitment, business model development, and technology implementation. And once those are accounted for, the brokerage needs to scale to meet its aspirations.
In this startup phase, there can be so much focus on execution that other valuable concerns get pushed to the background. It usually isn’t until the business hits serious roadblocks that things like data strategy and governance get the attention of the business. But there is tremendous value, and a lot of pain that can be avoided, when data and its impact on the business and the people operating it is thoughtfully considered and addressed.
Monstrato worked with a startup national brokerage that found itself exactly at the point where data was threatening to turn from valuable asset to difficult roadblock. The business had invested in systems that supported agent onboarding, brokerage operations, and transaction management. These systems all worked well on their own, and they contained valuable data and information about the people and performance of the brokerage.
But the brokerage leadership couldn’t use the data and information easily. They knew it was valuable. They knew it held potential to improve operations and drive growth. But they didn’t know how to put it all together.
There were basic questions that leadership needed to be able answer consistently and easily: How many active agents does the brokerage have across the country? Where are they located? How are an agent’s closed and referred transactions affecting their standing in the revenue-sharing program?
The inability to answer these valuable questions lead the brokerage to work with Montrato. By utilizing Monstrato’s BUILD Framework, Monstrato worked with the brokerage to evaluate its data environment, help develop a data strategy, and guide implementation.
Monstrato’s BUILD Framework
Led by the BUILD Framework, Monstrato was able to help the brokerage conduct a thorough discovery process and focus on a foundational business need: a trusted view of their agent population. This first use case provided direction for the wider strategy and established a foundation for additional revenue-sharing reporting.
Monstrato worked directly with leadership and operations staff, guiding one of their existing employees in the setup and maintenance of a reporting environment using a comprehensive data platform (Keboola) and cloud data infrastructure (Google Cloud Platform). AI tools were utilized to further enhance efficiency and effectiveness of the brokerage’s data analytics and reporting.
Ultimately, the brokerage received repeatable, trusted agent counts, geographic visibility, and view of agents’ standing in their commission and revenue-sharing program.
BUILD stage
Application in this engagement
Begin with the person
Understand the decisions leadership needed to make and the reporting work staff performed.
Understand the system
Examine source records, workflows, exceptions, definitions and responsibilities.
Identify the good
Select a useful, manageable first outcome: trusted agent counts and geographic visibility.
Lay out the future
Develop the strategy and guide implementation of a repeatable reporting foundation.
Deliver stewardship
Validate usable results, document the environment and equip an internal employee to maintain the work.
A major impact the BUILD Framework has is that it connects the purpose of an initiative to the systems, responsibilities, and people required to deliver and sustain it. As always, BUILD began with the people of the brokerage who needed the information to make good decisions.
B - Begin with the person
Understand who needs the answer and why
Monstrato’s initial mandate from brokerage leadership covered data governance, strategy, integration, and reporting infrastructure. In order to fulfill this mandate, Monstrato guided the brokerage through a discovery process that began with asking about how those capabilities would serve the people running and operating the brokerage.
Leadership wanted a clear, trusted view of the business across markets.
Operations staff needed to be able to produce reporting that could be trusted.
The employees responsible for implementing the data strategy needed a data environment they could understand, develop, and maintain.
All of these needs were closely related and aligned, but none of them were identical.
Leadership needed trusted agent count and geographic reporting because production figures alone didn’t explain a market’s performance. Leadership needed to know which markets needed more attention on recruitment and the performance demographics of the agents already within the brokerage. A reliable view of the agent population was necessary in order to be able to accurately interpret the numbers and make decisions that would move the brokerage forward.
Operations staff needed to have confidence in the reporting they were providing to leadership, and using themselves. During discovery, staff repeatedly described having to do a lot of manual, time-consuming work to manipulate data before producing anything reliable. Producing that reliable result relied heavily not only on the time-consuming processes, but also on familiarity with exceptions and judgements about which sources and records were necessary to calculations.
The employees who were tasked with implementation and maintenance of the data systems needed more than a finished dashboard to be successful. They needed to understand how the data flowed, how reporting was supported, and how everything came together.
Beginning with these people clarified and solidified the purpose of the engagement. The work needed to improve the lives of the people by improving the organization’s ability to answer consequential questions, and then maintain that ability over time.
Direct access to leadership and operations staff was foundational to the success of the discovery process and the overall engagement. Executive conversations established priorities, and operational staff conversations revealed the work and uncertainty of the existing situation.
U – Understand the system
Examine how records become business information
The brokerage’s systems reflected the different activities they supported:
The onboarding environment held information about prospective agents and their progress toward joining the brokerage.
The brokerage operations platform contained data related to agent records, office assignments, transaction activity, and commissions.
Staff also used spreadsheets to organize, combine, and communicate reporting.
Each system served a purpose; but each system also functioned as a silo. This created challenges when a business question crossed the boundaries of the systems, or required distinctions that the standard reporting of each system could not express.
Monstrato examined each of these systems and discussed them with the staff that worked in the systems.
Through the inspections of the systems and listening closely to the experiences of the staff who worked in them and had to rely on them for reporting, Monstrato was able to distinguish several kinds of problems:
Information that existed but was difficult to extract or present usefully
Records that required cleanup or better classification
Business rules that needed to be clarified and explicitly defined before a calculation could be trusted
Reporting processes that depended on an individual’s personal, manual interpretation
The system included all of these elements: software, data, workflows, definitions, and human responsibilities.
Having this understanding of the system, and exposing that understanding to leadership and staff, prevented the engagement from treating every difficulty or challenge as a need for another tool. It also informed the decisions about which tools would be required, and the purpose that they would serve.
I – Identify the good
Choose a useful outcome that can guide the wider strategy
The discovery process revealed many possible improvements. Leadership desired operational visibility, financial insight, and a strong foundation for continued growth. The initial scope of the engagement also included data governance and potential integration work.
Monstrato proposed developing the data strategy through a specific use case, rather than attempting to define the entire future state before delivering anything useful to the business.
Through collaboration with leadership, an active-agent report was established as the foundational use case.
This decision was important because agent identity and status were foundational to many of the other questions the brokerage wanted to answer. Before leadership could interpret production or agent progress through the commission and revenue sharing program, it needed a trusted picture of the agents themselves.
Data operations and activity must always be driven by business outcomes. In this engagement, the desired business outcomes all began in the same place: a trusted count of active agents and their geographic distribution.
Within the BUILD framework, “identifying the good” means making the intended benefit explicit: what possibility should be realized, who should benefit, and how will the result be recognized?
In this case, the good was going to benefit leadership and operations staff by providing leadership with a firmer basis for making decisions about market presence and performance, and operations staff would have a robust, repeatable reporting process.
Foundational use cases should always be tightly focused and manageable. Delivering a trusted active-agent report met these requirements perfectly.
L – Lay out the future
Connect strategy, governance, and implementation
With the foundational use case established, Monstrato guided the brokerage toward the desired outcome by following a practical path that included both technical infrastructure and clearer responsibility for data.
The brokerage already had a working draft of a data governance charter. Monstrato reviewed the charter with attention to how governance would function in the everyday work of the brokerage. Monstrato then made recommendations that emphasized recognizing existing responsibilities and integrating data decisions into current business processes. Monstrato used the principles of Non-Invasive Data Governance to arrive at a governance model that served the needs of the brokerage without creating burdensome policies.
Monstrato looked at what leadership and operational staff were already doing to manage their data, made those responsibilities more clearly defined, and recommended ways to better support their efforts.
Monstrato’s governance action plan recommended interviewing data owners, mapping existing decision processes and identifying formal stewardship activities. It also proposed using existing meetings and communication channels where practical.
Monstrato guided the brokerage’s existing employees in establishing a reporting environment with three main capabilities:
Ingestion, transformation, and orchestration of data
Shared data warehouse for operational data
Reporting and visualization within the planned environment
Environment documentation recorded how brokerage operations data exports were ingested, how components were configured, and how data moved into the data warehouse. Data ingestion was scheduled on a daily basis. Costs for ingestions, orchestration, and storage were also outlined.
The architecture of the system was organized around making the relevant data and information available in a consistent and trustworthy manner.
The brokerage designated an employee for management and maintenance of the system, and funded the infrastructure. All tools were acquired and owned by the brokerage. Monstrato provided assistance, guidance, and strategic judgment to help the brokerage implement all of the infrastructure.
D – Deliver stewardship
Leave a usable capability with accountable people
The final BUILD stage concerns what happens when the work enters regular use.
For this engagement, a successful outcome was defined by repeatable reporting and an internal ability to maintain it. A report that could only be reproduced or explained by Montstrato would have left the brokerage dependent on outside support for a basic operating question.
Monstrato worked with and guided the brokerage employee responsible for technical setup and maintenance. Guidance connected implementation decisions to the business questions, while documentation recorded the environment and its dependencies.
An example of this was when changes to an export configuration in the source system could require corresponding changes to the ingestion component. Recording that relationship gave the internal team information needed to maintain the reporting process when the source changed.
The engagement also produced a working data catalog, glossary, and dictionary materials. These provided a basis for continued development, as some aspects remained in draft form. Governance development could continue alongside implementation. The engagement did not represent a completed enterprise-wide governance rollout; it provided a strong foundation for a growing governance program to support the data strategy and operations.
Extending the capabilities to another business question
After establishing agent-count and location reporting, Monstrato helped the brokerage address where each agent stood in its commission and revenue-sharing program.
This required understanding agents in relation to their closed and referred transaction activity. It also needed to reflect the program’s business logic and the relationships represented in the data.
The earlier work provided a foundation for organizing the data, and Monstrato again provided guidance to brokerage employees in the setup and maintenance of the report.
Ultimately, the brokerage obtained a repeatable, trustworthy view of agent standing in the program.
This progression demonstrates stewardship beyond the initial deliverable. The brokerage gained a foundation upon which it could build additional capabilities.
What the engagement delivered
The brokerage received four concrete capabilities:
Trusted active-agent reporting. Leadership could work from a trusted, repeatable view of agent population, rather than manually cobbling together raw personnel exports in spreadsheets.
Geographic visibility. Reporting showed where active agents were located, supporting a clearer understanding of, and better decision making for the brokerage’s presence across markets.
Revenue-sharing visibility. The brokerage could understand agents’ standing in their commission and revenue-sharing program in a single report.
A maintainable reporting foundation. Scheduled data ingestion and orchestration, documented configuration, and guides to employees supported continued operation and development.
What brokerage and MLS leaders can take away
This engagement shows how BUILD keeps a data initiative connected to its purpose.
Beginning with the person exposed the decisions and reporting burdens that mattered.
Understanding the system revealed why available records did not produce trusted answers.
Identifying the good made clear what useful first outcome would drive the strategy forward.
Laying out the future connected governance and technical implementation.
Delivering stewardship helped the capability remain inside the organization.
For brokerages, the approach is relevant to all aspects of the business, from operations to leadership and strategy.
For MLS organizations, the transferable lesson is the framework. There are often many questions that and MLS has about its subscribers and members. The BUILD framework gives an MLS not only a way to approach these questions, but also to execute and get answers.
Any consequential business question can be the starting point for a wider data strategy. Answering it well reveals the sources, definitions, responsibilities, and capabilities needed for execution, continued development, and growth.
Begin with the answer your organization needs
Which important question does your leadership team want to answer, but is frustrated by getting there? Which important question(s) is being answered by reconciling a maze of spreadsheets, interpreting exceptions, or relying on a knowledgeable employee to audit a report?
Monstrato uses BUILD to help real estate organizations turn fragmented operational data into an actionable data strategy that will lead to trusted answers and repeatable reporting, and more confident decision-making.
We work directly with leadership and the people responsible for the systems to identify a valuable use case, guide implementation, and develop the organization's ability to maintain the result.