In my consulting practice, there is one quote I always live by, and I remind our real estate team leaders and brokers over and over again of its importance: “If you don’t write it down, you can’t measure it. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

What we measure—our key performance indicators, or KPIs—is critically important. In real estate, there are many KPIs we can measure. Brokerages and team leaders often start with these, each of which have their own subset of important measurement criteria:

• Agent recruiting
• Agent retention
• Agent productivity
• Buyer/seller referrals
• Company revenue per deal

At my company, Real Estate Webmasters Inc., my job can be summed up very simply: to generate net profit for my customers. That’s it!

Yes, we make you look great and help you win design awards; our SEO and PPC services are world-class; and our custom engineering capabilities are unmatched in the real estate space. But all of those things are just necessary parts of the journey.

Ever wish there was a button you could push that would tell you how you’re doing in your real estate business? All your important conversion and ROI numbers? How much you’ve spent on each marketing source and which ones are generating positive profits?

I know I have! I have dreamed of this for years! In fact, the number one problem I run into when working with brokerages is not being able to access the numbers. It’s not that they won’t share them—it’s much worse than that. It’s that they don’t have them.

Imagine running a team or brokerage that generates billions of dollars in annual sales volume and not being able to answer these questions:

• What have we spent on marketing this quarter? This year?
• How many leads have we generated?
• Which lead sources have generated deals for us?
• Where are we getting our best ROI?

It’s simple stuff, right? We should know these things!

Sadly, there is not a single customer who can tell me these numbers when I start working with them—at least not without a lot of digging and conversations with multiple departments. And when they do present this data, it’s usually not reliable or accurate.

As we dig deeper into this challenge, there are many variations of why we don’t easily have these metrics at our fingertips. But across all customers, the one commonality is that it’s a lot of work.

Often, these metrics are owned by different departments (marketing, IT, closing coordinators), and there is no one tool that allows for collaboration between these groups. There’s certainly nothing out there that takes the critical next step of calculating and measuring the KPIs and outcomes.

REW Deals seeks to solve these problems.

With our new budget attribution system and source tracking, combined with full deal workflows and reporting, brokerages can now easily run reports on the health of their company.

• What did the last quarter/year look like?
• How are we doing right now?
• Is our pipeline healthy for next quarter?
• Where are we winning?
• Where are we failing?

As with any system, the output is only as good as the data that is entered. To meet this challenge, we have built a deal-tracking system for agents that gives them the very same reporting and forecasting for their business.

2024 is a whole new ballgame. If brokerages and team leaders want to come out on top and grab market share, they must start incorporating data into their businesses.

Remember: “If you don’t write it down, you can’t measure it. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

Let’s go improve our businesses together!