Could the right suppliers and tools give your agency its best year yet?
Most agencies run on a stack of suppliers and tools built up over years. A customer relationship management system to hold your contacts and track your deals, the portals your listings go out on, a sign board company, an inventory provider, a mailing tool, a social scheduler someone signed up for and half the team forgot about. Each was added for a good reason at the time. Few are ever looked at again. A simple year-end review of your estate agency’s suppliers and tools is one of the easiest ways to free up money and time. Done well, it can do something more interesting too: turn the suppliers you back into a source of income. Here’s how to approach it.
Reviewing your estate agency suppliers: are they earning their place?
Start with the companies you pay every month. For each one, write down what you get for the money and what would happen if you stopped. PropTech moves fast, and the right supplier can save your team hours a week or help you win more instructions. The wrong one quietly drains budget and motivation while nobody quite gets round to changing it.
You’re sorting suppliers into three groups: clearly pulling their weight, clearly not, and the ones you’re unsure about. Keep an eye, too, on the suppliers you rate enough to recommend. When you send one of them business and help them grow, there can be a way to share in that success rather than just paying the invoice. That’s part of what ICG Collective offers agents. Find out more here.
Your agency systems: is your technology saving time or costing it?
Good tools take admin off your team so they can spend more time in front of clients, which is where business is won. So look at how work really moves through your agency. Are your people re-keying the same details into your CRM and then the portal? Chasing updates a system should surface on its own? Working around software rather than with it? Each of those is time not spent valuing, listing or looking after clients.
You don’t need a full rebuild. Most agencies find one or two sensible changes, a better link between two systems or swapping a clunky tool for a simpler one, hand the whole team hours back every week. Those hours are free growth.
Your people: skills and retention for 2027
Technology only pays off when the right people use it well. Going into 2027, look honestly at your team: where the skills gaps are, who’s ready for more responsibility, and what would make your strongest people want to stay another year. Recruitment and retention are among the highest costs any agency carries, so small improvements here protect both your culture and your bottom line. A short conversation with each person about what they want from next year often tells you more than any report.
How to run an estate agency supplier review in two hours
You don’t need a consultant or a week off the desk. Block out a couple of hours before the year ends. List your suppliers, your main systems and your team’s strengths and gaps on a single page. Mark each as clearly working, clearly not, or unsure. Pick the two or three unsure items that would make the biggest difference if you got them right, and make those your first jobs for January. One page, three marks, a short action list. That’s enough to start 2027 with a plan rather than a pile of renewals you never read.
As you go, keep a separate note of the suppliers you’d happily recommend to another agent. Those are the ones worth backing properly. With ICG Collective, backing them can mean a seat at the table and a share of the rewards, not just a line on your expenses. It turns a routine review into a chance to build income and influence from partnerships you were going to have anyway. The value you help create in the industry stays with you, rather than flowing only to the suppliers.
Explore ICG Collective and turn the suppliers you believe in into a share of your agency’s future.