How the Real Estate Assistant Keeps Track of the Team’s Numbers

Know your numbers.

Have you heard this before? What does it actually mean? What numbers do you need to know?

Basic Numbers

Like baseball stats, there are a TON of things you can keep track of. But here are the basics you should know off the top of your head:

• # of units, volume, and GCI for last year
• # of units, volume, and GCI year to date
• average sales price
• top 5 sources of business and what percent of business comes from those sources

So how do you get these numbers? Unless you have some sort of CRM that tracks this for you, a lot of it is going to be manually done by you. I haven’t found a CRM that tracks EVERYTHING I want to track, so I do the majority of our tracking using spreadsheets.

Let’s start with the basics.

Quite simply, create a new spreadsheet with following column headers:

• source
• L (for listing)
• B (for buyer)
• street address
• sales price
• GCI
• brokerage fee (if with KW, should be two columns, one for cap and one for royalty)
• charity donation
• net
• closing date

Click Activity Summary to download a sample spreadsheet that you can customize.

Use the totals at the bottom of the page and now you know # of units, volume (all sales prices added together), GCI and average sales price.

Your sources of business are easily calculated as well. Just sort the spreadsheet by Source and count how many times each source is listed. Then divide that number by the total to get the percent. In the sample spreadsheet, there are 2 sign calls, 2 expired listings, and 2 personal referrals. 2 divided by the total of 6 is .33 or 33%. So 33% of this business comes from sign calls, 33% from expired listings, and 33% from personal referrals.

Advanced Numbers

Some additional stats that will be helpful to the team is to know:

• what % of appointments will sign a listing agreement or buyer agency
• what % of listings will close a sale
• what % of buyers under buyer agency will close a purchase
• how many dials does it take to get a contact
• how many contacts does it take to get an appointment

Here’s where the magic happens. Your team wants to know these. Then, all they have to do is make the right number of dials to get the number of closings they want.

So first, you have to track.

Weekly Contacts Tracking Sheet

Monthly Goal Tracker – Listings

Monthly Goal Tracker – Buyers

Print up a bunch of the Weekly Contacts Tracking Sheets. Each agent on your team should get a new sheet on Monday and turn in their sheet to you from the previous week.

Print the Monthly Goal Trackers for buyers and sellers and post them in a common area for everyone to see. Use them to write in the date and the last name of the clients for each category. The only thing the agents should be writing in on these trackers is their appointments. (This is appointments gone on; I don’t let them write an appointment until after they get back from it.) You as the assistant will write in everything else since the agents should be giving you their signed listings and buyer agency agreements as well as their signed contracts. And, of course, you are keeping track of when things close.

At the end of every week, I take the information from the weekly contacts tracking sheet and the monthly goal tracker and enter it into the tracking spreadsheet:

Tracker

This is our team’s actual numbers from July 2015. To track for the whole year, I just copy the spreadsheet onto a new tab, rename the tab for the month and write in the dates for the weeks.

As you can see, not all team members are great about reporting, which can skew the numbers. But right now, I have a pretty good idea that it takes our team on average 41 contacts to get a closing.

So if we want to close 100 transactions, we need to make 4,100 contacts over the course of the year, or about 341 contacts per month, or about 85 contacts a week, or about 17 contacts a day (for a 5 day work week). And at 2 dials per contact, I know we need to dial 34 numbers per day.

Now, this is just for calling. If the agents go door knocking, then you can turn “dials” into “doors” and track that way.

If an agent goes to one of their kid’s events and end up talking to several people about real estate, then those contacts will get reports as such, but there won’t be a corresponding number of dials. So, while these aren’t hard and fast numbers, it does give you an idea of how many contacts the agents need to be making to get the number of closings they want.

Finally, use this spreadsheet to figure out the rest of the numbers:

Month Over Month

Yes, I’m a little behind in keeping up with the numbers this year!

Now I can calculate some monthly numbers. Ron wants to close 66 listings this year. Last year, 95% of the listings he took actually sold. So this year, Ron has to get 69 listing agreements. Last year, 50% of the listing appointment he went on turned into listing agreements, so this year he has go on 139 appointments.

The blue shaded boxes are the goals and the white boxes are the actual.

Through June, we can see that Ron went on a total of 85 listing appointments. So in order to get to 139, he has to go on 54 more appointments. I can spread that 54 out over the remaining 6 months, or I can play to the cyclical nature of real estate and front load the summer months and back off on the winter months. Thus the goal for each month changes as the number of actual appointments gone on fluctuates.

Once I update all the monthly goals at the end of the month, I change the Monthly Goal Tracker by highlighting that month’s goals in red and shading the numbers over that in gray. This way, we can review at a glance whether the agents are hitting their goals or not.

I had considered doing the monthly and weekly goals and tracking online, but I think the agents really need the visual. Ours posted on a wall right need the door to our office so everyone can see it when you walk in. Even other agents who stand in the doorway can easily see how close our agents are to meeting their monthly goals. It’s just an added layer of accountability.

I Know It’s a Lot to Keep Track Of!

Yes, this part of the job is tedious! The agents really don’t enjoy keeping track of their numbers, but they like knowing their goals and they knowing where they stand. The agents on our team really do a pretty good job of turning in their numbers every Monday. This really comes from the lead agent. If the lead agent isn’t doing it consistently, there’s no way you as the admin are going to get anyone else’s cooperation. It has to be a team effort between you and the lead agent to insist that these numbers are valuable and that EVERYONE on the team needs to be accountable for turning in these numbers.

I’m happy to answer any questions you have about my system. (It’s not the prettiest, I know! I’m not an Excel guru; I know just enough to get the numbers I need.) If you have a better system, I’m all ears and I’m happy to share with my readers. Just email me at egilbert AT kw DOT com.