Real estate is one of the most human businesses left. It is emotional, high stakes, and deeply personal. People are making decisions that affect their families, their finances, and their sense of security. Yet the technology supporting this industry often feels disconnected from that reality. On the surface, everything appears functional. Deals close. Closings happen. Agents get paid. But beneath that surface is a daily experience filled with friction, confusion, and unnecessary stress that most people have simply learned to tolerate.
Let me start by admitting the obvious truth. At the end of the day, real estate is about making deals happen. No client cares which CRM an agent uses or which portal generated the lead. They care about clarity, trust, and feeling guided through a complex process. Because deals still close, the industry has collectively accepted broken experiences as normal. That acceptance is the real problem. When success is measured only by transactions, poor experience never becomes urgent enough to fix.
A clear example of this lives inside the CRM layer. Tools like Follow Up Boss are widely adopted and provide real value. They centralize contacts, log activity, and help teams stay organized. But once heavy integrations are layered on top, cracks begin to show. Duplicate contacts appear from a single inquiry. Conversation timelines lose context. Notes exist in one place but not another. Not a deep search implemented. The system technically works, yet it rarely tells the full story. In a business where timing and nuance matter, partial truth is often worse than no information at all.
Now add portal integrations into the mix, especially with platforms like Zillow. Zillow itself is not the villain. It surfaces demand and gives buyers access. The real issue is how information flows, or fails to flow, between systems. A buyer receives a message that sounds final and confirmed. The agent, looking at a different system, sees the appointment as requested but not approved. A showing platform waits on the listing side. Three systems present three different states of reality. One human is left confused, and another is forced to explain a contradiction they did not create.
In a business where timing and nuance matter, partial truth is often worse than no information at all.
This is not a communication failure. It is a design failure. Software is supposed to reduce uncertainty, not introduce it. When systems disagree, agents fill the gaps manually. When agents fill gaps manually, human error enters. When human error enters, stress multiplies. None of this shows up on a performance dashboard, but it shows up clearly in the lived experience of buyers, sellers, and agents.
There was a time when these issues were understandable. In the early 2000s, web standards were still stabilizing. Browsers behaved differently. Mobile was secondary. HTML5 was still maturing. Integration was fragile by nature. That excuse no longer holds. It is 2025. Cloud infrastructure is mature. APIs are stable. Event driven systems are common. AI can summarize conversations and predict outcomes. We are moving fast toward automation and intelligence, yet the basics still fail. Confirmations are not confirmed. Context disappears between tools. Users are expected to mentally reconcile contradictions. This is not a technical limitation. It is a lack of human centered design.
Another uncomfortable truth needs to be said clearly. Most real estate salespeople are not technologists. They come from sales, hospitality, construction, education, retail, and community based backgrounds. They are people people. They read emotion well. They manage stress. They guide conversations. That is their strength. UX should never be their burden. Systems should adapt to humans, not demand humans adapt to systems. When tools require workarounds, agents normalize them. They double check messages. They call to confirm what software already promised. Clients never see the effort. They only feel the friction.
I want to add something important here. I am part of a team on Long Island that is more advanced than most. Strong leadership. Solid volume. Better processes than many offices. And yet, we are still using the same broken systems. This is not a team problem. It is a platform problem. No matter how disciplined or experienced a team is, the experience will not fundamentally change until the technology itself changes. That change does not come from agents or even brokerages. It comes from tech companies that believe they are already delivering a great experience.
This is where my background in UX research matters. Good UX does not start with opinions or feature lists. It starts with observation. In real UX research, you go into the field. You shadow users. You watch what happens when things break under pressure. You observe interruptions, workarounds, and stress points. That means sitting with real estate salespeople during live transactions. Watching them juggle calls, texts, CRMs, portals, clients, and emotions at the same time. It means diary studies where agents log moments of confusion over days or weeks, not surveys or feedback forms. This is basic UX research practice, and much of real estate tech feels like it was built by people who have never sold a house.
There is also a gap in quality assurance. Many QA processes test whether software works, not whether it makes sense. Buttons click. Data syncs. Messages fire. Tests pass. But no one asks whether the system helps an agent stay calm when five things happen at once. If designers never shadow agents and QA teams never observe real deals from start to finish, the software will always optimize for technical correctness instead of human clarity.
This problem has a name. It comes from Alan Cooper , who described something called Dancing Bearware. You see a bear dancing and you are impressed, not because the dance is good, but because a bear is dancing at all. That is much of real estate technology today. It technically works. Barely. Enough to keep moving. Agents tolerate it because there is no real alternative. Teams build processes around flaws. Brokerages accept inefficiency as the cost of doing business. Over time, everyone goes numb.
The danger now is that AI will not fix this automatically. AI will amplify whatever system it sits on top of. If the underlying data is fragmented or misleading, AI will confidently summarize the wrong truth. That is not innovation. That is risk.
Real estate salespeople should be guides, not translators. Their job is to create calm, reduce confusion, protect their clients, and move deals forward cleanly. They should not be apologizing for software messages they did not create. We can do better than applauding dancing bears. Deals will continue to close. The real question is how much unnecessary stress we are willing to accept simply because we got used to it.
That is the conversation worth having.
