What Should You Be Tracking In Your Real Estate Business

I'm not going to lie. I love spreadsheets and I love tracking. I love tracking my business. I love tracking in my personal life. I've got trackers for everything. Here's the thing though, most real estate agents are allergic to spreadsheets. They hate numbers. I lose them when I mention any of that. Stick around. I'm going to really go deep here in a way that you can understand that you can implement some of these tracking systems into your business or, or at least know where you might be missing out in your business and the thing that might be holding you back from the growth that you desire and deserve. And stick around as well. I'm going to give you access to a free 15 minute training where I'm going to go super deep on the drivers and accelerators that you need in the business to be able to scale your business without scaling your hours. If you like the video, give me the thumbs up and subscribe to the channel and turn notifications and leave feedback, leave comments so we can interact with each other. Most real estate agents and team leaders are not wired for numbers or tracking or spreadsheets. Here's the thing, if you want to scale your business predictably, you have to embrace tracking. So in today's video, I want to go just category by category. The things you have to pay attention to in the business and the things that you must track. The first area of tracking and it's critically important is marketing and lead generation. You know, this is an industry. We are, we are, we're heavily marketed to, you know, The Zillows, the realtor.com, the new lead gen platform that's going to do great things. Just give me five grand up front and 3,000amonth and I'll generate all the seller leads you could possibly have, right? It doesn't work out that way. Those companies prey on the fact that as real estate agents as a whole, as an industry, we don't track anything. Right? We're high I personalities, we're extroverts, right? We want to believe that what you're saying is true. We want to be friends with you, Mr. Company. That's marketing to me. Unless you're tracking, you know, the lead you generate, how much money it costs, how much it costs to set an appointment with that lead source which indicates the quality of that lead, how much it costs to get to a face to face, a met, and how much it costs to actually sign a new client and how much it costs to close that transaction. You know, if I didn't have Tracking in my business. I started on radio when I was the only one on radio in my market. It was roughly, I think it was like three to $400 it would cost me to get to the front door of a listing consultation. Meaning, you know, a lead was generated, an appointment was set and I physically met that person. So not accounting for whether I took the listing or not. So if I could arrive at your front door for 400 bucks and I was the listing agent, so I didn't have a cost of sale to pay another agent at the time. Those are good numbers. It's gone up to like six to seven times that cost. You know, there are some months where we're like $2,500 to get to the front door or to have a virtual consultation or, or to have a potential seller client come into the office. It's still not an awful roi. But we're at the point with RADIO that on a net net basis we've gone from seven, eight times cash on cash return to two to three times cash on cash return. So we've had times where we've had to scale back RADIO because we know there are other lead sources like our database, like yard marketing, like our expired and FSBO program, right? We know those are working better. Like our social proof. We have 1300 five star reviews online that are generating business for us with no cost and a little bit of effort, right? So if you're not tracking your marketing, you're not gonna scale your business. I hate to say it that simply, but it's true. The next area that tracking is critically important is in your new business development efforts. When I talk about new business development, it's what are you doing every day to bring in new business? Right? You can't rely on the buyer that you're showing homes to or the listing that you have on the market every day. You have to carve out a time block in your day. We do three hours with 50 minutes on laser focused new business development and 10 minutes off for three cycles at a minimum. You know, if you're not doing new business development in a time block fashion and you're not tracking your meaningful contacts, right? A meaningful contact is a meaningful conversation with a decision making adult about real estate. You have to have tracking around your contacts, the amount of appointments you set, the amount of appointments you meet, sign, you know, executed contracts and closings and nurtures you add to your database. Right? You have to track those efforts because if you're at the point where you're the only one doing it, it's this evolution of I do it, we do it and they do it. The shift from agent to owner is only as complicated as like, I've got to do the thing first. So if you're not willing to hold yourself accountable to tracking your new business development efforts, you'll never have a chance to be in, you know, shoulder to shoulder with agents that are going to trust you to come into your world where now we do it, get a few more agents, dial in your systems, you know, get them to really understand the culture and the importance of tracking around new business development and then you can step out and they do it right. Most of us don't want to do any new business development, but we can never get out of it if we're not willing to track our efforts. The next area where tracking is important is in client success, in your client care. So when you sign a new buyer or you sign a new seller, what's the process to take them from excited to work with you because they were just sold, quote unquote, right? You sold them, you promised them a set of services and how do they go from, you know, new client to looking for homes or getting on the market as an active listing, to going under contract, the contract to close. How do you get them to the finish line in a systematic way where they have great things to say about you? So there's a few things you want to track here. We track something called Net promoter score. It's a simple question, based on your experience with high performance real estate advisors, how likely are you to refer our services to a friend, a colleague or a family member? Very simple question. It's 1 through 10 and there's a calculation of those that are like raving fans versus promoters versus detractors. So detractors are like give you one through six and promoters give you nine or ten. It's the nine and tens, the number of them minus and it's in percentage. It's a weird calculation. The point is you have to track, you know, how your clients feel about working with you. Another thing we track is how many of our clients give us a review online, a five star review out of the number of closings that we have. It's an important metric, right? The virtuous cycle that we created in our business around marketing is only going to work if we can generate new business from the amazing experience we just gave an existing client. So that's another thing we track in client care. The last thing we track in client care is how many of our clients before they Leave the closing table gave us a high quality referral. That's something that we just started a few years ago where we didn't used to track that at all. Once we started tracking it and we started focusing on client care as a system, we went from less than 5%. So less than 1 out of 20 buyer and seller clients out at the closing table, they're leaving 1 out of 20 of those clients had already given us a referral. We went from 5% to 40%. So 1 out of 20 to 4 out of 10. That is amazing, right? It seems like it wouldn't be that low. If you're not tracking it, I promise you, it's in the 5, maybe 10% range because you haven't built out the systems, you haven't built out the client experience and you're not tracking net promoter score. You're not tracking whether or not they leave you a social proof, a testimonial. You're not tracking the fact that they gave you a referral or not before they left closing. So that's the critical area here in terms of tracking that most agents and most teams don't think about. How do you track when it comes to the service you provide your clients, the last area that you must track in is the area of your finances. And not only your finances, but the key performance indicators in your business. These are lagging indicators and leading indicators. Leading indicators are the activities that you track that lead up to getting someone under contract or to a closing or money in the bank, or you know, your profitability in a certain month. So contacts set, met sign, all those things in new business development. Those are leading indicators, right? How many listings do we have active on the market? That's a leading indicator. How many price improvements did we have last week? Those are leading indicators. The lagging indicators are cash in the bank, volume closed, GCI closed, real revenue or gross margin closed. You know your P and L, right? The different categories, the economic model that you're following, you know, gross margin, the amounts you're paying for marketing or administrative staff or overhead, all of that, those are lagging indicators. So you have to become the CFO in your business. It reminds me of a story of a guy that was on my team, Dan Jones. I knew he had an entrepreneurial spirit in him and I knew he was eventually going to do his own thing. He spent three years with me, was a really awesome agent, sort of saw my operation from the inside and decided to go out on his own and do it. And eventually, after some prodding and Convincing him that it was cool that I taught him how to do what I had done in my business. He was struggling as a solo agent. Not that he wasn't selling a lot of homes, but he was just working way too many hours and honestly letting down his wife Nadia. At the time they didn't have Charlotte, their daughter yet. But he knew he had to build the business out in a certain way so that he had the leverage to be able to do it. And I think about the area of finances and Dan. When we first used to coach together, he used to physically come into my office and we once a month we would just sit across from each other and we would do a financial review. And he would write out on a piece, like a legal pad, yellow legal pad, all of his commission checks and all of his expenses. So he would do his P and L, which is a lagging indicator. He would write out his P and L and I honestly believe I would tell him month after month I'm like, hey, this is my bookkeeper. Call her for like minimal dollars per month. You can afford it. She will do your books and she can print out a really good looking PDF and all you need to do is review it. And he said, no, I'm good, I'm good. And I believe that manual process of just physically writing out. I paid this money to Lars for business coaching. I paid this for, you know, leadstorealtor.com I paid this for my assistant. All of these expenses. I believe he was just, it was a visceral experience for him to realize that, okay, this is my model, these are the income I'm bringing in and the money I'm generating. So he went from 65 sides to 300 sides from, you know, struggling at 500k to make the hours worth of money he was making to 3 million in GCI where he hasn't been in production for a couple years. He coaches and loves on his agents and holds them accountable. He took two months off when his daughter Charlotte was born and now he can show up in a way that he didn't have growing up. He shared a story with me about his dad not being there for him, being gone for a week or two at a time, you know, doing business and providing for the family where, you know, he wasn't able to have that dad growing up. And we connect there on that level as well with my, with my experience with my dad. But anyway, just a cool story. And it reminded me of like, don't over complicate this. If you're at the point where all you need to do is kind of add up your commission checks and then, you know, add up your expenses and do a P and L by hand. Do it, but you must start tracking in your business. I mentioned earlier in the video that I put together a 15 minute training to take you through the four drivers and 12 accelerators to scale your business without scaling your hours. Just go to predictablerealestatesuccess.com or click on the link below. If you liked the video, give me the thumbs up. Subscribe to the channel and turn on notifications. We'll see you in the next video.