Most brokerage advice comes from people who never had to make payroll. Keith Dunham and Jennifer McKinley ran HomeCity Real Estate past $500 million a year in sales across Austin and Dallas, moved its margin from roughly 3% to over 25%, and sold the company to Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate. Keith also co-built Opcity (acquired by Realtor.com) and has since advised venture-backed proptech companies on real estate operations. Book a consultation and you talk to them, not a sales rep.
The road that earned the advice
Every recommendation on this page was tested with real payroll, real agents, and real closings before it became advice.
HomeCity Real Estate
Ran operations to more than $500 million a year in sales across Austin and Dallas, at hundreds of closings a month.
Sold to Better Homes & Gardens
Opcity
Co-built the agent referral platform that matched ready buyers to agents at scale.
Acquired by Realtor.com
Proptech advisory
Advised venture-backed real estate technology companies on operations and product.
Advisory work
What does a real estate brokerage consultant do?
A real estate brokerage consultant helps a broker-owner build the business side of a brokerage: recruiting, retention, operations, staffing, technology, compliance, and margin. The difference at Empower is who does the consulting: operators who ran a $500 million-a-year brokerage, not analysts working from a slide deck.
Keith’s thesis, learned the expensive way: focus on the wrong thing and you fail. Brokers fail the same way agents do. A broker who loves contracts hides in contracts. One who is good at marketing stays in marketing. Meanwhile nobody is recruiting, and the brokerage stalls. Consulting engagements attack that directly:
- Recruiting systems and a value proposition agents actually move for
- Retention and agent-production coaching, especially for newer agents
- Operations design: what to staff, what to systematize, what to outsource
- Your AI and software stack: built, bought, or retired
- A compliance function that coaches agents instead of just filing paperwork
- Margin work: where the money leaks and how to get it back
What does the do-it-all habit cost a broker-owner?
More than any line item shows. The hours your team, and you, spend on file chasing, paperwork, and admin never appear on the P&L. The real bill is the recruiting and retention work that didn’t happen, and that invisible cost is what the margin arc above measures.
Doing everything yourself is “the slowest, most quietly broke thing you can do.”
Codie Sanchez, founder of Contrarian Thinking, on why owners buy back their time
She is describing every owner-run business; we lived the brokerage version. Running everything in-house feels responsible. It is quietly the most expensive habit in the building, because it staffs fixed payroll against variable work and parks the owner’s highest-value hours on checklist tasks. We broke the whole decision down in what a broker should delegate, and what should stay yours, including the delegate-versus-keep table we use with consulting clients.
How do you build an AI-powered brokerage?
Start with the work, not the tools. List every task that does not produce revenue (file review, transaction paperwork, onboarding, reporting) then decide what AI and software you own can run, and what still needs an operator. Buy nothing you could build in a week.
We run Empower this way ourselves. Claude plus serverless functions and a database now covers most of what a brokerage needs day to day: CRM, reporting, billing, marketing automation. We ran Follow Up Boss for years, then built our own CRM and cut the subscription. AI reads contracts and drafts the routine work; software you own moves the file; people step in where judgment matters. Software flags problems. A team resolves them. That split is the one Empower runs on its own compliance desk: software reads every document first and a specialist owns every call. See how AI compliance review holds up in practice, and what a brokerage should automate with AI, and what it never should.
Two buying rules we hold clients to: check any tool’s value against what Claude and a weekend of building gets you, and keep paying for the things that genuinely feed revenue. On lead sources, the ones we’ve seen worth the money are Zillow, Realtor.com, and Movoto.
How do you recruit and retain real estate agents?
Make agents the whole job. Brokers who grow spend their days meeting agents, sharpening the value proposition, and building culture. Recruiting fails when the broker is buried in contracts and marketing. Move that work off your desk and recruiting stops being a side project.
The first six months and the first twenty agents set the trajectory. New broker-owners try to do everything at once, then retreat into whatever they were already good at. The successful ones outsource marketing and back-office admin early and spend that recovered time with as many agents a day as their calendar holds. How many depends on the agent and what they need from you.
Retention is coaching. A new agent’s first three to ten transactions need heavy broker involvement, and the fastest coaching signal is the contract itself. A compliance function should surface what the broker considers important on every file, so review becomes teaching, not just paperwork. That is exactly how we built Empower’s compliance service.
Should you start your own real estate brokerage?
Yes, if you are ready to trade selling for leading. A new brokerage lives or dies on recruiting, value proposition, and culture in its first six months. The economics have changed too: the back office that pinned HomeCity near 3% margins is outsourceable now. Ours passed 25%.
Here is the arc behind that number. In the early 2010s there was no real option to outsource a brokerage back office. HomeCity carried every coordinator, file reviewer, and admin on payroll, and even at over $500 million a year in sales the margin sat around 3%. Once outsourcing existed, the work moved off payroll and the margin climbed past 25%. A $50–60k in-house admin hire versus roughly half that for specialists who do it better, multiplied across a whole operations department.
Starting today, you can be lean from day one instead of unwinding a payroll later. That is the plan we build with new broker-owners: the licenses and entity are the easy part; the operating model (what you staff, what you outsource to a partner like a fractional back office, what you automate) is where the margin is decided.
Who will you talk to?
Keith Dunham and Jennifer McKinley, the people who ran the brokerage. A consultation with Empower is a broker talking to a broker: what to fix first, what it should cost, what to stop doing. Nobody reads a script, and nobody hands you off to an account rep.
Keith Dunham
Co-Founder & CEO, Empower Transactions
Led operations at HomeCity Real Estate to $500M+ a year in sales before its sale to Better Homes & Gardens. Co-built Opcity, acquired by Realtor.com. Has since advised venture-backed proptech companies on real estate operations and product. LinkedIn · Full bio
Jennifer McKinley
Co-Founder, Empower Transactions
Ran day-to-day operations at HomeCity Real Estate (the systems, the files, the agents) and co-founded Empower to give brokerages the operational support she had to build by hand. Meet the team
How does a consulting engagement work?
Book a consultation below. We dig into your brokerage (agent count, deal volume, staffing, stack, margin) and give you a straight read on what to fix first. From there the engagement is scoped: advisory, a defined build, or Empower running part of your back office.
- Book the consultation. Pick a time on the calendar below. You meet the founders, and the first conversation costs nothing.
- Get the plan. A specific, prioritized read on recruiting, operations, stack, and margin, with numbers, not platitudes.
- Execute it, with us or without us. Some brokers run the plan themselves. Others have Empower build the systems or run the operations. Both are fine outcomes.
Pick a time with the founders
Frequently asked questions
How much does real estate brokerage consulting cost?
The first consultation is free. After that, engagements are scoped to the work: an advisory arrangement, a defined build, or ongoing operations through Empower’s fractional back office. You will know the number before anything starts.
Do you only work with large brokerages?
No. We work with team leaders deciding if a brokerage is the next move, new broker-owners in their first year, and established multi-office firms. The common thread is a broker who owns the decisions and wants an operator’s read before making them.
Can Empower execute the plan it recommends?
Yes. Empower runs transaction coordination, file compliance, billing, and admin for brokerages nationwide, including partner programs with REAL and NextHome, so a recommendation can become a running back office, not a report in a drawer. Plenty of clients also take the plan and run it themselves.
Do you consult for proptech companies?
Yes. Keith has advised venture-backed real estate technology companies on operations and product. If you are building software or services for agents and brokerages, the same operating experience applies: how brokerages actually buy, staff, and run their operations.
Is the consultation a sales call?
No. It is a working session with the founders about your brokerage, and you leave with specific next steps you can run without us. If an engagement makes sense after that, we will both know.