Courted borders on near-business critical: Tech Review Update

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This article was last updated Jan. 30, 2025.

Courted is enterprise software for brokerage recruiting and management

Platforms: Mobile-first browser app
Ideal for: Brokerages; team leaders
Initial Review: November 2021
Updated: January 2025

Top selling points:

• Brokerage, team research functions
• Updated recruiting intelligence
• Coaching and management systems
• Real-time agent/office activity metrics
• Pipelines for volume, performance benchmarking

Top concern:

It’s possible some brokers would worry about Courted’s perceived contribution to the culture of bidding wars for top producers and teams. Or, they can get run over, because rest assured, the competition doesn’t care.

What you should know

Courted has advanced well beyond its agent networking functionality (which is no longer offered) to provide brokerages and teams with business-critical software that blends analytical data gathering and organization to support oversight decisions on people and processes. Brokers and territory managers can use it to source activity for targeted agents, teams and competing brokerages.

Courted helps users find where prospects are finding business and then dig from there into data on attrition, average list price sold, sales volume, market share, most active ZIP Code, and common property details, among other research drivers.

The software can apply its powerful office and market research features to its coaching and retention tools, functions that are deliberately kept separate within the application. The two business principles are too often blended to the detriment of each.

Courted wants its customers to know that while coaching is part of an overall retention strategy, the latter requires more long-term and proactive oversight. Agents who aren’t responsive to coaching may not be worth becoming part of a retention strategy.

Plus, not every agent needs coaching (but it can never hurt), and Courted is able to assess agents at such a level of granularity that it can identify recruiting prospects that if only coached properly, can become top producers. The coaching functions offer additional confidence for the recruiting broker, who can see current agents’ work records in a simple, card-based UI that surfaces an agent’s current stats and pertinent profile information.

In the Manage module, brokers and team leaders can get a glimpse into the relevant stats from the top-down per office or business unit. It delivers tasks, breaks down how often collaboration is happening and presents agent milestones worthy of follow-up, such as a new agent’s first closing, a 100th listing agreement or whatever else you choose to use as a means of acknowledgement or as a reason to consider some coaching.

On the whole, Courted uses machine learning and predictive analytics to determine a number of things about the agents in your brokerage, and elsewhere. Namely, it learns when they’re looking to make a move from their current brokerage  — or out of yours. That’s right, it can let office leaders know when it’s best to get proactive in keeping your people in place, and it uses a sharp, AI-based communications module to help, called ComposeAI. It uses a great deal of personalization, derived from a massive pull of market data about agents in every competing brokerage.

Targeted agents, whether in a recruiting or retention effort, can be searched for and organized in the same way an agent would use a CRM to identify critical leads. Each “prospect” is illustrated clearly alongside their current brokerage, recent deals, colleagues who have worked with them, historic activity and performance forecast. The company describes it as a Bloomberg Terminal for brokerage leaders.

The software incorporates, or is based upon, the idea that agent production is intrinsically volatile. Production goes up and down, even for top producers. So Courted’s team set out to apply its algorithms to better predict spikes and declines in performance, which is what it means by sending the right message to the right agent at the right time, which is materialized in its ComposeAI functionality.

The user experience is advanced in its ability to present actionable data on recruiting targets. It’s a consumer-influenced series of panels and spreads that allow for the pleasant digestion of information that could easily demand a run to the medicine cabinet if handled differently. Courted turns people and their business activity into a fantasy football draft experience, not to put too fine a point on it.

More advanced applications of Courted include M&A due diligence and franchising. Revealing waves of declining agent counts, brokers who may be approaching retirement age or years of stagnant growth and low volume are all part of Courted’s skill set and can be combined with extensive reports on competitive brokerages, allowing ambitious business leaders to know when to start sniffing around.

From its potential to move metrics to its automated alerts to a target’s sliding market ranking, Courted is so much more than a human resources tool. This is a tool to aid in revenue generation.

Courted has 400 customers, up from 79 a year or so ago. It’s in 125 markets, has 3.5X’d its revenue year-over-year and is profitable with 14 employees. Its model is as transparent as the data that powers it: recruit-retain-research. The more you know about who you recruit the better you can be at coaching them and keeping them around.

The decision to make research a product pillar makes Courted fundamental to any real estate leader with growth plans for 2025. There’s little doubt that the coming year will bring significant hardship for smaller brokerages challenged by the advancement of tech-savvy, big-budget brands that can afford to innovate and whose CEOs are given more opportunities to platform their brands and speak out on industry upheaval.

I believe Courted will become an industry standard by year’s end, the Adobe Photoshop of talent management and strategic brokerage management. It offers an exceptionally organized and tangible framework around the collective strategic asset that is your agent roster, eliminates the risk of having to guess how the next quarter will go and offers insights that navigate brokerage leaders around the market’s many landmines.

Real estate has said forever that it’s a “relationship business.” But it only applied such jargon in the context of getting business.

Courted applies it to building business.

Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe

Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.