Loan officers building a referral pipeline frequently make a common but costly mistake: following as many real estate agents as possible in the hope that sheer volume will convert into business. According to Mike Simon, founder of real estate data platform AgentBrief, that instinct is backward — and it is one of the main reasons a real-time data tool ends up underused.

AgentBrief built its platform on hourly monitoring of the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) — the databases where agents’ property listings are recorded — giving settlement service professionals a live feed of agent activity rather than a historical report. But Simon says the data only pays off if users are following the right agents in the first place, not merely the most active ones. The stakes are structural: real estate agents are the referral source behind a loan officer’s future mortgage business, so who lands on a follow list effectively shapes where the next transactions come from.

The most obvious signal to chase is listing volume. An agent with many new listings looks busy, and busy looks valuable. Simon says that is only half the picture.

“How many new are they able to acquire every year? That’s a big one,” he said. “But second to how many listings they acquire, it’s really important for a loan officer to be paying attention to how many they actually close.”

In a slower market, a high number of listings can be misleading. Some may be new construction, and some may sit unsold for months. A loan officer chasing volume alone can end up spending time on agents who never close the deal that made them look attractive in the first place.

Simon points to a third metric that receives even less attention: who the agent represents on the buy side — transactions in which the agent works with the homebuyer rather than the seller. That figure is smaller and more finite, but it tells a loan officer something a listing count cannot. A closed buy-side deal is confirmed business, not activity that might or might not turn into a transaction.

Taken together, the three signals Simon flags are listing volume, closing rate, and buy-side representation. None of them is useful on its own. An agent who lists constantly but rarely closes is not the same opportunity as an agent with fewer listings and a consistent close rate.

Simon has heard a counterargument many times from customers: invest early in newly licensed or low-volume agents, and they will be loyal later. He pushes back on that every time.

“You got to feed your family. You got to pay your rent,” he said, describing the instinct to focus on producing agents rather than potential ones. Investing time in agents who are not currently doing business, he added, is not wrong as a small part of a strategy — but it should not be the strategy.

That distinction matters more in a real-time system than in a traditional CRM. When data arrives on a delay, the cost of following the wrong agent is diluted across weeks of missed context. When alerts arrive hourly, every notification a loan officer acts on represents time spent on that specific agent instead of someone else. Following agents without transaction volume to back them up means spending real-time attention on stale opportunities.

Simon argues the shift to real-time alerts has changed how loan officers should behave once a notification arrives. In the past, delayed data allowed for a more passive response. Now, with alerts landing within an hour of MLS activity, the same information demands a faster, more deliberate move.

“This is real. This is new that just happened. I can move fast and move first,” Simon said, describing the mindset a loan officer needs once they trust the timing of the data they are acting on.

That trust only holds up, however, if the agent behind the alert is worth the response. A loan officer who filters for listing volume, closing rate, and buy-side activity before following an agent is positioned to act on every alert with confidence. One who follows broadly and reactively ends up with a feed full of noise, no matter how fast the data arrives.

For loan officers weighing how AgentBrief’s real-time signal compares with the historical data most lenders have long relied on, the platform’s title and escrow solution demonstrates how the same filtering approach has already worked in a settlement services vertical built on the identical referral dynamic. For now, the practical question for individual loan officers is availability: AgentBrief’s services are currently available in select markets, according to Citybuzz.