How Freight Brokering Works Transportation and trucking brokers are rapidly becoming one of the driving forces behind freight distribution. More and more logistics providers are using freight agents to find customers, and more and more businesses are getting in touch with freight brokers in order to find trucks, storage trailers, and distribution systems. Freight brokers are also called truck brokers, freight agents, property brokers and transportation brokers – although it’s uncommon to hear all these terms used to describe a single business, and ‘freight broker’ is probably the most common form. The role of a freight broker in freight distribution involves a lot more than just finding a business that has freight to move and ‘matchmaking’ it with a trucking company or logistics provider. In fact, although it’s possible for a trucking broker to function as an agent in a particular transaction without ever setting eyes on the freight itself, a much more common scenario is for the freight broker to be more closely involved with many different facets of a relationship between a trucking company and a company which is looking for a logistics provider. Freight brokers exist to meet the third-party logistics needs of industries and businesses that are growing rapidly and require efficient agents to deal with their freight shipping. In fact a freight broker may be responsible for any number of different tasks, from finding trucks and freight to tracking down available warehouse space. Large companies often use freight agents to meet specific technical and logistics needs for which they feel they need the services of a logistics industry ‘insider’. For example, a business may turn to a freight agent to make the arrangements if they need to send pallets of cold freight in a temperature-controlled reefer, or if they need to liaise with other special concerns inside the logistics industry. It often falls to a freight agent to arrange a company’s involvement in pallet exchanges, or in freight consolidation, or in any of dozens of other aspects of the freight shipping process. The freight business and 3PL industries are also growing rapidly on global, national, regional and local levels to meet these demands, so there is no shortage of freight brokers in today’s marketplace. However, in the information age the freight brokering trade has come within the reach of even the smallest start-up entrepreneur. A lot of a freight broker’s job consists of liaising between trucking companies (or other companies that provide logistics) and businesses, and the resources needed to do this on a small scale are household items – a phone line and a fast internet connection. However the role of the freight broker is still diverse and complex and requires as much expertise as it ever did.