A single-speaker YouTube podcast (April 2020) advising real estate team leaders and agents which business metrics to track—primarily on a weekly roll-up—to scale and sustain operations during a shifting market (COVID-19 era). The speaker (engineering/finance background) lists core categories: new seller business (set→met, met→signed, volume signed), new buyer business (set→met, met→signed, volume), lead sources (radio, expired/FSBO, repeat/referral plus others), listings activated and active inventory (including price improvements), written vs closed volume and GCI, real revenue (GCI less payouts), weekly net cash flow and net cash position. Emphasizes systems, scorecards (team, marketing, recruiting, operations), and a Call-to-Action to RealEstateBSchool for help implementing tracking/systems.
What's up, business Freedom Podcast listeners, Today's podcast is going to turn most of you off. So I'm just warning you, if this turns you off. When I mentioned the title of the podcast, that means you must keep listening because I'm going to talk about tracking today and what to track in your business, especially a shifting real estate market. So hopefully the second part of the title got your attention. Willing to dig in and listen to what I have to say. So my brain naturally lends itself to tracking and numbers. I have an engineering undergrad. I went to Duke. Don't hate me if you're not a Duke fan. I don't even follow sports, hardly any sort of. I don't really follow basketball or any of that stuff. But if you do, don't hate me. I went for my focus in finance for my MBA from Duke and I worked at Bear Stearns as a financial analyst in investment banking. And then I worked for like seven years in acquisitions and strategy for an aerospace company, traveling the world, analyzing businesses and ripping them apart financially. You know, their numbers, their sales pipeline, what they were doing for marketing and new business development and their operations and all of it. So I have a quantitative. I love numbers, and I think numbers, they tell the truth, which is why I love numbers. It's why I love business and it's why I love tracking net worth and just tracking things that you can't really spin. Like let's just be honest with ourselves about where we are in our businesses and where we are personally. And I think the world will be much better off and businesses will be a whole lot stronger. So I want to go through with you all of the categories that I track in my real estate business on a weekly basis. And most of these are tracked daily. They're just rolled up once, once a week. And so they're going to start out in sales and then kind of lead down to operations. The first one that we track or the first category is new seller business. And we track three things. Seller set to met. So listing appointments set and the percentage we meet sellers met to signed. So the ones we meet, how many did we sign? And then new seller volume signed critically important, if there's one group of things to track in your business, it is how many listings you're taking and the volume and your conversions on the listing side. And this is whether you're just sort of launching into building a real estate team or you're running a real estate team at a high level. If you're not tracking those things, it's Going to be ugly. The next category is buyer volume sign. So new buyer business in that week. And the first one is buyer set to met percentage. Buyer met to sign percentage. So how many you set versus how many you met versus how many you signed and then new buyer volume signed. So we could see at a snapshot this week. So this is the first week of the second quarter. Even in the midst of what we have going on right now with the. The COVID situation and the acute, hopefully acute, I think it's going to last a bit of time here. You know, we're not really allowed to do business the way that we were just a few weeks ago. And who knows how long this will last. Last week though, we signed 1.7 million of listings and we signed 1.2 million of buyers. Pretty good, not too bad. And then we track three lead sources that we have sort of a high. We have some investment of time and money. And we track radio, which has been just really challenging year over year over year over year for the last four or five years. Radio has been challenging for us. And then we Track expired and FSBOs our business there and then repeat referral. We have lead source categories that we track and we look at closed and pending by each of those lead source categories. We track them for all eight of our lead source categories. Those three though, we bring up to the team scorecard. I also have marketing scorecards and recruiting scorecards and operations scorecards and sales scorecards which go deeper. This is the overall team scorecard and these are things you need to track in your business as well. Next category is listings activated. That is an important leading indicator of success in your world. Everything good comes from listings that are activated, then listing volume activated. So how many listings did I activate actually get active and live on the mls? Then what's the volume of those listings as they went active on the mls? Not the listing agreements you signed as in the previous number, what actually went live. The next category is your active listing inventory. So the number of active listings, the active listing gci. So for the volume and what you signed it at, what's the GCI hanging out up, you know, what's the potential GCI and then the number of price improvements. So if you have 20 listings, your goal is probably to get three to four price improvements. Some people call it price reductions or price improvements during that week. So we have a weekly goal of price improvements. Then most folks just track the rest of the numbers I'm going to talk about, which are total volume written and total gci. Written. So that's how many executed contracts in terms of volume and gross commission income did you execute last week? Then total volume closed, total GCI closed. And then the real revenue of the GCI you closed. So GCI less what you pay your broker and your agents, all your agents inside, outside your showing agents, all of them. What's left over is your real revenue. So I want to know on a weekly basis, how much real revenue did we actually close? So I can know if how much of our expenses did we cover? What's the profit? I know a weekly profit number because I know what our overhead is, our operating expenses are. Then the last two things we measure our net cash flow. This is simply cash in, cash out for the week. Our tracking week starts on Monday and it ends on Sunday. So we just take Monday to Sunday and we see exactly the cash that went in the bank account and the cash that went out and hopefully it's a positive number. Then the net cash position, this is all of the money we have less. We have one credit card which we pay off monthly. So all of our checking accounts and we run profit first. We have multiple checking accounts, if you're familiar with profit first. Then we subtract out our credit card which is just like a revolving, like a weekly or monthly revolving credit line. We don't carry any debt as a business and so we want to know our net cash position. And our goal is to keep about $200,000 in the business and anything left over we distribute. And that's it. That's the high level numbers you have to track. Sales and marketing and recruiting and operations go a little bit deeper, which I'm not going to get into a whole lot of it. Now these are the things you have to track on a weekly basis. And then you have targets for how you want these numbers to look like quarterly. And you rally the whole team around all of these numbers and so that you can actually move this business forward. You have annual, quarterly, monthly, and then break it down into weekly. And some of these things we track daily. And so hopefully you're still listening because I understand for a lot of you this is not like the most exciting topic. Here's the thing about tracking. You can't predictably scale a business unless you're tracking these numbers or a subset of these numbers or maybe there's different numbers that you track for different reasons. You cannot scale your business profitably and systematically and sustain it sustainably. If you're not tracking and you don't embrace tracking, it's just not going to be possible. And so if you struggle in this area, the reason why real estate B school exists is that we do things, we help you put tool systems into place that you naturally struggle with. You know, it's the process side of business, it's the tracking side of business. It's, you know, putting a system in place to bring talent and onboard that new talent. It is, you know, how do you work your database systematically and how does your team rally around it? So you systematically get results from the database and from the sphere of influence of all of your team members. Right. So it's. How do you take one listing and turn it into five commission checks? That's our listing maximizer system. You know, so there's systems you have to have in place in your business if you want to scale your business. Otherwise, you're not going to scale your business. You can't do it just based on more output by you. That is the formula for most real estate agents, even top agents and team leaders is I just got to put out more rather than making this mental shift around, how can I do more without me doing more? How can the business do more without me doing more? So if you're stuck in that conundrum. I never used the word conundrum. It just seemed appropriate. If you're stuck and you can't scale because the business is too dependent on you, there's a systems issue, there's a process issue, there's a tracking issue, there's some sort of leverage and sustainability issue. And, and that is why real estate B school exists. If that's you, go to realestatebschool.com, request a strategy session. That is the easiest and quickest way to get on the phone with me or one of our coaches who have done this before, built a fully leveraged, sustainable business. And we'll have a conversation about how you can do it too, based on where you are and where you want to go and what's holding you back. So go to realestatebschool.com, there's a brief application, there's an orange button there either says apply now or request a strategy session. And we'll take that next step together. We'll talk to you soon.
