KAYSVILLE, Utah. — December 11, 2025 — People in real estate love to talk about disruption, but the truth is the industry still runs on duct tape. Agents juggle spreadsheets. Teams pass client onboarding forms from one platform to another. Brokerages call their tech “end-to-end” when half the tools refuse to talk to each other.
Meanwhile, the rest of the consumer world has been living with realtime transparency since the Domino’s pizza tracker debuted in 2008. Brian Charlesworth, founder and CEO of Sisu, noticed that gap long before it became a talking point. Charlesworth married into real estate, landing inside his wife’s fiveagent team (now 80 agents) and quickly realizing that the operational backbone it needed simply didn’t exist. While everyone around him was still chasing lower splits and cheaper transaction fees, Charlesworth was quietly betting that teams would become the true engines of the industry.
“The traditional brokerage brings no value,” he said. “You hang your license, you sell homes, and they take a percentage of your paycheck. If I go to a team, I get leads, I get training, I get software, I get transaction coordination.”
The milestone that changed the company’s perspective
“When I started the company,” Charlesworth said, “the thought was, ‘When I get to 100,000 agents like I’ve made it.’” Now, having met that milestone, the new thought? “OK, we’re just getting started.”
At launch, the company saw itself as a sales performance platform, but “learned really quickly that there was a lot of antiquated ‘technology debt’” in the real estate industry. “People were using things like whiteboards to do transaction management,” Charlesworth said. That’s when he and his team set out to build a true end-to-end platform.
While adding operational efficiency on the team side, the company also created the client-facing “pizza tracker” for real estate — a consumer portal that brings transparency to the transaction process. It’s a value-added, white-labeled product that helps teams generate leads and delight clients for more repeat and referral business. What Sisu sees now, with more than 6 million transactions running through its system, is a real-time snapshot of where the best teams are pulling ahead — and where everyone else is stuck in the mud.
What Sisu sees now, with more than 6 million transactions running through its system, is a real-time snapshot of where the best teams are pulling ahead — and where everyone else is stuck in the mud.
5 measurables that are poised to drive team performance
According to Charlesworth, here are the data points and leadership habits that are set to drive superior team performance in 2026.
1. Tracking financial indicators within the team
“Being a great salesperson and building a team are two different things,” Charlesworth said. Team leaders have to learn how to read a profit and loss statement and how to track financials. Avoiding operational blind spots helps high-volume agents make progress when they scale with a team structure, allowing the team lead to “work on their business instead of in their business.”
2. The hidden economics of splits and value
The real estate industry at large misunderstands how teams operate financially and why lower splits often backfire on team profitability. Team owners who are paying for software, leads and employees while maximizing agent splits run into “the same problem the brokerage has,” Charlesworth said. They don’t charge enough to bring value.
3. Differentiating the team with accountability
According to Sisu’s data, the highest-performing teams share one cultural thread. “It’s a word that nobody’s liked in this industry. And the word is accountability.” When operational headaches are handled, the team leader can become more like a business coach, holding agents accountable and helping them see where their weaknesses lie.
4. Reading the tea leaves
When data is tracked at scale, it becomes an early-warning system for market movements at both the macro and micro levels. Because it works with anonymized data across those 100,000 users, Sisu is able to see increases in buyer representation agreements or decreases in transaction volume before the business owner sees them.
5. The use of AI as a growth engine
Charlesworth sees artificial intelligence as a transformational equalizer that will reshape coaching, operations and organizational strategy. “People have just leveraged AI as this thing that will write articles … that’s like AI 101,” he said. “What if for $500 a month, you could have an AI business coach that knows your business better than anybody?” That’s a more valuable and more meaningful use of this cutting-edge technology. He hinted at the idea that Sisu will be launching this imminently. Charlesworth’s best advice for agents and teams that want to grow? “Go back to the basics.” Success in real estate is “predictable,” he said, as long as you’re doing your part. “If you’re consistent, you will be successful.”
Troy Palmquist is the founder and principal at HomeCode Advisors. Connect with him on LinkedIn.
