5 Key Real Estate Metrics and KPIs You Should Be Tracking for Success
How do you measure success as a real estate agent?
If you begin and end with sold homes, you’re not getting the full picture.
There are many other real estate metrics that agents should be looking at to evaluate their business.
Tracking those real estate KPIs is important. They’re an indicator of the strength of your real estate business and whether or not you’re well-positioned to get clients and close deals.
Time to look beyond just sales. These are the five key real estate metrics and KPIs you should be tracking for success.
Website Traffic
We’ve said it before (many times!) and we’ll say it again: your real estate website is one of your most important business-building tools.
It’s the first destination for potential new clients, and that’s true whether they heard of you via a word-of-mouth recommendation, a Google search result, your Instagram account or in a news article.
Your real estate website can generate meaningful leads. But only if it’s getting traffic.
Website traffic is one of the most important real estate metrics for real estate agents to track today.
It can be an indicator of whether your SEO, Instagram and TikTok, pay-per-click ad and postcard strategies are working or not.
This real estate KPI isn’t just about how much traffic your website is getting, but what that traffic looks like.
You want to pay attention to how many visits (unique and returning) your website is getting, where those visitors are coming from, how long they’re staying, where on your site they’re going, what they click on and what pages they leave from.
All of that data will help you get a sense of how your website is being utilized (or not).
Leads Generated
If your website is performing well, then it will be boosting this next real estate metric: leads generated.
This KPI represents the warm connections that have come into your sphere via open houses, lead magnets, Instagram direct messages, and so on that you will be contacting and hopefully nurturing into clients. These leads can be potential buyers or sellers.
A thriving real estate business will have a pipeline full of leads. The more leads you have (and can follow up with), the more sales you’ll eventually have.
To track this real estate KPI, you want to monitor how many people are on your follow-up list at any given time.
You should also take note of how they got onto your list (again, via open houses, lead magnets, Instagram DMs, and so on); this will help you determine which of your tactics is the most successful at bringing leads into your pipeline.
Conversions
When a lead becomes a client — because you won a listing presentation or a buyer agreed to work with you after a buyer consultation — that’s a conversion.
A high number of generated leads is great, but if none of those leads are converting, then you’ve got a problem on your hands.
To figure out your rate of conversion, you can divide the number of leads that actually went on to become clients by your total number of leads and multiply that result by 100 to get a percentage.
What’s tricky about this metric is establishing an average to compare yours to. As a starting point, consider that the National Association of Realtors® in the U.S. estimates that the average conversion rate is probably between 0.4% and 1.2%.
To help you contextualize your conversion metric, it’s worth asking your brokerage if they have an average they can share with you or speaking with friends in the business about their own rates.
As a starting point, consider that the National Association of Realtors® in the U.S. estimates that the average conversion rate is probably between 0.4% and 1.2%.
Expenses vs Revenue
It’s one of the most essential key metrics for any business: you want to be making more money than you’re spending.
Not overdoing it on “supplies” might sound obvious but in real estate, expenses like subscriptions, memberships, meals, ads and events can quietly add up.
And if the market is cool, it can be easy to lose sight of when more money is going out than coming in.
Keeping an eye on this simple metric is just good business practice. If you’re experiencing a downturn, knowing where you’re at will help you figure out whether you need to trim expenses and how.
Listings Taken vs Listings Sold (or Buyers Represented vs Buyers Closed)
Listings taken vs listings sold looks at how many listings you’re actually selling. Its equivalent for buyers is how many of your buyers are closing their purchases.
In other words, conversions (the leads that become clients) vs sales (the deals you help those clients make).
Like conversions, you can calculate this metric by dividing the number of closed deals by the number of total clients by and multiplying that result by 100 to get a percentage.
For example, if you had 24 clients in 2022 and of those clients, 18 bought or sold a home with you, your conversion rate was 75% that year.
This is an important metric to consider over time. You want to pay attention to how this rate fluctuates and why. You also want to dig deeper and evaluate why some clients didn’t close. That kind of analysis can help you troubleshoot your business.
