By Keith Dunham, Founder & CEO of Empower Transactions.
A brokerage operations benchmark is a structured comparison of how a brokerage handles the back half of a transaction — who reviews closing files, how much time it takes, and whether the brokerage’s own file requirements are written down or carried in someone’s head. The six questions below take about a minute. Answers are recorded anonymously.
Six questions about how your brokerage handles closing files. Answers appear as you go.
0 of 6 answered
We will email your answers back to you with the method behind them. When enough brokerages have responded to report on, you will get the aggregate too.
Why is file review harder to staff than it looks?
Because a closing file does not answer to one standard. It answers to four, and only the smallest of them is the same in every state.
- Federal — fair housing, RESPA, lead-based paint. Uniform nationally, and the smallest of the four.
- State commission — required forms, disclosures, retention periods, broker recordkeeping duties. Different in every state.
- NAR and your local board or MLS — the REALTOR® Code of Ethics and MLS policy where they apply, including written buyer agreements, plus the local association forms your agents actually use.
- Your brokerage — the house requirements that exist only inside your company: the clause you always want initialed, the deadline you run tighter than the state does.
A reviewer who knows one of the four will pass a file that fails on the other three. That is the staffing problem, and it is why broker file review is rarely solved by hiring one more admin.
How many documents does a single closing file require?
It depends on the deal, which is the whole difficulty. Empower’s internal document manifest currently carries 309 required-document entries across four states — 178 in Texas, 51 each in Missouri and Kansas, 29 in Florida — and two-thirds of them are conditional. They apply only when something about the deal calls for them: a home built before 1978, an HOA, an entity on the seller side, a particular financing type. Only about 6 percent are federal.
That manifest is the document layer, mapped state by state. The checks Empower runs are wider than it: 1,264 distinct compliance rule checks nationwide, covering execution, timing and completeness as well as which documents belong in the file.
A static checklist catches the third that always apply. The other two-thirds have to be read for, deal by deal. That manifest is what we have standardized so far, not the extent of where we work — Empower runs file review nationwide and builds the requirement set for whatever states a brokerage operates in. See the full method.
What does the benchmark ask?
Six fixed-choice questions, each one chosen because it changes what a file review has to cover: how many agents you have, your role, how many states you operate in, who reviews closing files today, hours a week spent reviewing them, and whether your own file requirements are written down.
When do results publish?
Not until there are enough responses to report honestly. No overall figure below 40 completed responses, and no figure for any segment below 10 responses in that segment. Every published figure will carry its sample size, its date range, and a link to the method. Until then the results screen tells you what your own answers describe and says plainly that it cannot yet show you a peer comparison.
Frequently asked questions
Is the brokerage operations benchmark anonymous?
Yes. A completed response stores the six choices, the date, and the page you first landed on. No name, no brokerage, and no IP address is stored with your answers. An email address is stored only if you ask us to send your results.
How long does it take?
About a minute. Six questions, fixed choices, no typing unless you want your results emailed.
Will I see how my brokerage compares to other brokerages?
Not yet. The survey opened in August 2026 and we will not publish a peer percentage before the sample thresholds are met. Showing you a comparison drawn from a handful of responses would be worse than showing you none.
Who should complete it?
Anyone who knows how closing files actually get reviewed at your brokerage — a broker-owner, a managing broker, an operations or compliance lead, or the admin or transaction coordinator doing the work.
What happens to my email address if I ask for results?
We email you your answers and the method behind them, and we will send the aggregate once it exists. The response list is never sold, rented, or shared, and no response is ever published in a form that identifies a brokerage.
Is this a random sample of brokerages?
No, and we will not write it up as one. Everyone answering arrived at a page about outsourcing file review, so results describe brokerages already looking into the question rather than brokerages generally. The methodology page states this in full.
Related reading
- Broker and enterprise operations
- Do brokerages outsource compliance?
- What broker file review actually takes
- Interim broker compliance coverage
- Empower services
Schedule a consultation if you want to talk through what outsourced file review would look like for your brokerage.