What Is HHG Broker Software? The Operating System Behind a Moving Brokerage

HHG broker software is the platform that runs the daily operation of a moving brokerage. The license lets you operate; the software is what makes operating possible at any real volume. Here's exactly what it does, workflow by workflow.

HHG broker software is the platform that runs the daily operation of a household goods moving brokerage — lead pipeline, quoting, carrier dispatch, payment collection, and payouts, in one system instead of scattered across spreadsheets, a personal phone, and a notes app. If you're getting licensed and wondering what HHG broker software is and whether you need it, the short answer is that the license lets you operate and the software is what makes operating possible at any real volume. This post breaks down exactly what the software does, workflow by workflow, and where a brokerage running without it tends to fail.

Why "HHG Broker Software" Is a Specific Category

HHG stands for household goods — residential moves, the kind a family books when they relocate. It's a distinct FMCSA authority type from freight (property) brokerage, and the operation runs differently enough that general tools don't fit.

This is the first thing to understand: most software a new broker finds is built for the wrong job. Generic CRMs are built for B2B sales teams. Dispatch software is built for carriers who own trucks. Freight broker tools are built around load boards and lanes, not residential moves priced by the cubic foot. HHG broker software is built for the specific shape of this business — matching residential customers to licensed household goods carriers, pricing two different ways, and holding consumer payments in escrow. Using freight or carrier software to run an HHG brokerage means rebuilding half of it by hand. For the full comparison, see our breakdown of what to look for in moving broker software.

The Five Workflows HHG Broker Software Runs

Strip a brokerage down and it's a routing system: leads in one side, completed moves and payments out the other. The software exists to run the five things that happen in between.

• Lead intake — capturing every inquiry into one pipeline so nothing is lost
• Quoting — pricing local moves hourly and long-distance moves by cubic foot
• Dispatch — assigning each booked job to a verified, insured carrier
• Payment collection — taking customer money in a way that survives disputes
• Payouts — paying carriers on completion and paying realtor commissions on time

Every operational failure in this business is a failure in one of those five. The point of the software is to keep all five running without any of them depending on your memory. The rest of this post walks through each one.

Lead Intake and the Sales CRM

Leads arrive from everywhere — a realtor texts a client's number, a web form comes in overnight, someone calls mid-quote with a competitor. Brokers lose deals here, before quoting even starts, because a lead that sits for hours goes to whoever responds first.

HHG broker software solves this with a sales CRM built around a single pipeline. Every lead enters the moment it exists, tagged with its source, and moves through stages — new, quoted, booked, dispatched, completed — so you can see at a glance how many deals sit at each stage and which are going stale. Source tagging does double duty: it shows which realtors actually send business, which tells you where to spend your relationship time. MagickPlat's CRM is built this way because a brokerage's first bottleneck is never a shortage of leads — it's leads falling through gaps in a system held together by memory.

Quoting: Two Pricing Modes in One Builder

HHG quoting runs on two models, and this is where generic invoicing tools cause brokers to underprice jobs.

Local moves price hourly — crew size times hourly rate times estimated hours, plus travel time. Long-distance moves price by cubic foot — volume times a per-cubic-foot rate for the lane, plus line items for packing, stairs, shuttle, and storage. These are genuinely different calculations, and a tool that only does one forces manual workarounds on every job of the other type.

MagickPlat's quote builder handles both modes natively. Two things follow from that for the broker: quotes go out in minutes instead of hours, which wins bookings against slower competitors, and the margin is calculated on every quote before it's sent, so you never discover after dispatch that you priced a job below the carrier's rate. The quote builder exists because Erica Dorsey, who brokered for ten years before building the platform, spent her early seasons rebuilding the same spreadsheet math on every single job.

Carrier Database and Dispatch

Once a job books, it needs a carrier — licensed, insured, available, and right-sized for the move. Without a system, this is a call-around every time: three voicemails, two carriers already booked, one who falls through on price. With one, dispatch is a selection from a network you've already built.

This is where HHG broker software earns its place most clearly. MagickPlat ships with an FMCSA-licensed carrier database pre-loaded by state, which removes the cold-start problem entirely — instead of spending weeks building a contact list inside FMCSA databases, you begin outreach on day one with carriers already organized by location and verifiable by FMCSA status. Built-in call scripts mean those first carrier conversations are structured rather than improvised, and there's a personalized script for every carrier in the database. Building and maintaining this network — onboarding new carriers, verifying authority and insurance on a schedule, replacing the ones who decline jobs — is the core ongoing work of running a brokerage, and the software is what makes it a daily routine instead of a scramble.

There's a second dimension here worth understanding before you launch: in the HHG model, carriers can pay a monthly subscription to be part of a broker's network and receive consistent job flow, with the broker keeping the majority automatically. That turns a carrier network from a cost center into something that produces recurring income independent of job volume — a structural advantage worth understanding in detail, which our income breakdown post covers.

Payments: Escrow In, Automatic Payouts Out

Payment handling is where new brokerages quietly fail. The pattern: a customer pays a deposit by card, something on the move disappoints them, they file a chargeback after completion, and the broker — who already paid the carrier — absorbs the loss. A few of those erase a season's margin.

HHG broker software built for the job solves this structurally. MagickPlat runs payments through Stripe with escrow: the customer's money is collected up front and held, the carrier sees the job is funded before the truck rolls, and on completion the carrier is paid automatically from escrow. The customer can't charge back money held against a documented, completed job, and the broker never fronts carrier payments out of pocket. That automatic carrier payout is in the platform for a specific reason — Dorsey paid her own carriers on time, every time, and built the system to do the same without depending on a broker remembering to cut a check. Reliable, automatic payouts are also what keep good carriers loyal to your network.

Realtor Partnerships and Referral Payouts

Realtors are the highest-quality lead source in this business — every home closing produces a guaranteed move — but the channel only stays open if commission payouts are reliable. An agent who refers a client and then has to chase the commission refers the next one elsewhere.

This is why payout automation is an operational decision, not a convenience. MagickPlat includes a realtor database by state with per-contact call scripts for recruiting, and a referral network that pays the 3–5% commission automatically when the referred job completes — no invoice, no reminder, no manual transfer. The agent sees money arrive within days of their client's move, which is the strongest signal you can send that the next referral should come to you. Our guide on becoming a moving broker covers how to build this channel during the licensing window.

Where the Software Fits in the Bigger Picture

Getting licensed costs under $2,500 and takes 4–6 weeks — a roughly $300 FMCSA application, a $900–$1,500 annual bond premium, and a process agent filing under $50. That's the entire barrier to entry, and it's deliberately small. The software is what determines whether the license becomes a working business or a certificate in a drawer.

The honest framing: HHG broker software doesn't make the business passive or automatic. The first 90 days are phone work — recruiting carriers, building realtor relationships, quoting jobs. What the software does is make that work repeatable and keep the five core workflows from breaking as volume grows. A broker doing the right activities with the right system scales; a broker doing them out of a notebook hits a ceiling fast.

Already licensed and ready to build the operation? The 42-lesson HHG Moving Broker Operations Course covers everything end to end — brokerfilings.com/course.