Eight is Enough For Success in 2025
Benchmark your firm against these eight metrics of performance of typical REALTORS nationwide. How does your firm's performance stack up?
This week’s post has two goals:
First to share with you eight key charts about the typical performance of real estate agents over the last year.
Second, to give you eight very simple areas in which you can help your people over-perform. In fact, by the end of this post, you might think to yourself:
“It’s going to be easier than ever to help my company succeed in 2025!”
First, where do these stats come from?
Well, hopefully, you’ve been reading the National Association of REALTORS® Annual Member Profile (link to highlights) regularly because it’s a perennial eye-opener. Most leaders benchmark against competitors using MLS stats like units sold, dollar volume sold, list-to-sell ratios, per-person-productivity, and days on market. Certainly, those metrics matter. But smart leaders know there are dozens of other critical competitive points that help optimize their entire organization — from recruiting and compensation strategy to training and technology investments and everything in between.
Not just data: Directions
Good data doesn’t just show comparisons: It provides directions. And this year’s report doesn’t disappoint. Page after page of performance metrics suggests hundreds of immediate ways effective leaders can adjust their company’s performance, raise targets, and establish performance targets that would outperform the industry averages — in some of the most obvious and immediate ways.
For example:
If you knew that the average age of a REALTOR was 55 (down from 60 the year before) you could benchmark your sales team (and adjust your recruiting value proposition) to talk Baby Boomer and Gen X demographics that still prevail.
If you discovered that 44% of REALTORS in the business less than 2 years were part-timers, and 62% of agents under 2 years experience earned less than $10,000, you might not worry so much about a competitor who was adding new licensees to their roster.
If. you noticed that only 60% of REALTORS use social media daily, and barely 32% use a CRM/database daily, you might prioritize your training and technology investments to immediately upskill your agents and drive sales performance.
The implications for your leadership plans are enormous: It’s all in the report. What else should you pay attention to in the data? Read on….
Here are eight key stats to adjust your thinking as a leader
#1. A third of all REALTORS sold less than a million dollars in real estate.
Look even closer: More than 25% of REALTORS barely sold $500,000 in property - essentially one house in America where the average price is ~$425,000. More than 62% of agents with two years of experience did as little. Now compare your agent roster to discover how getting everyone to at least one sale annually would outperform about 375,000 agents nationwide (25% of 1.5 million REALTORS).
#2. The average agent sold 10 “sides” last year.
At ten transactions per year, the average agent earned only $55,800. That means a sizeable chunk of the industry earns a living similar to a full-time fast-food industry job (which pays $20 an hour in California). That’s important information to know when talking to potential recruits and sharing the average earnings of your company’s roster. It’s also a good reference point for business planning with agents heading into the New Year.
#3. Most agents earned absolutely no business from open houses.
So here’s an interesting fact: In the NAR Survey of Buyers and Sellers (2024) a solid 49% of buyers said that open houses were the third-most important source of information about homes for sale. So, how is it possible that half of consumers use open houses, but 65% of agents generate no business from them? Barely one in five generated a slim 10% of business from open houses. You can see the problem opportunity: Train your agents to become super-skilled at in-person sales interactions and capture a completely untapped channel of business in every market.