Sales Volume Is a Vanity Metric; Here’s What to Track Instead

By Maria Coukoulis, COO of Spears Group and Co-Founder of MyOps

I have conversations every single day with team leaders who tell me how well their business is doing. They’ll cite a sales volume number, a record quarter, a big listing they just closed. And I always ask the same follow-up question: What was your net income on that?

The silence tells me everything.

There’s a big thing in the real estate industry where everyone loves to talk about sales volume. And I get it.

Volume tells you activity happened. It tells you nothing about whether that activity was smart, whether your expenses were controlled, or whether the business underneath that number is actually viable.

So when I talk about what we track at the Spears Group and why it’s changed the trajectory of our business, I’m talking about three specific things that most teams either ignore completely or measure so loosely that the data is useless.

Net income is the only scoreboard that matters

I always say it doesn’t matter what price point you’re selling. It matters what your net income is at the end of the day. How are you being thoughtful about your expenses? Are you even tracking them? Because that’s another thing people forget about. They know roughly what came in the door, but they have no real handle on what went out.

When Jonathan and I started looking at the Spears Group P&L with real discipline, meaning reviews where we tracked income rising and expenses stabilizing, that was the moment everything clicked for us.

We could see the shift happening in real time. And we could see it for Jonathan’s individual business and for the Spears Group agent business separately, which is a distinction most teams never make (more on that in a moment).

The reality is that the Instagram version of real estate success has trained our entire industry to measure the wrong thing. The number you post about is volume. The number that determines whether you have a real business is what’s left after expenses. And the gap between those two numbers is where most teams lose the plot.

If you run a team and you’re looking at one combined revenue figure, pull your income and expenses apart this week. Look at net.

That single number will tell you more about your business than your last twelve months of volume stats combined.

Your lead sources are probably too vague to be useful

The second metric that changes everything is lead source attribution, and the mistake almost everyone makes is being too general about it.

I see it all the time. An agent marks a lead as “sphere of influence” or “repeat client” and moves on. And I get it, because those categories feel descriptive.

But they’re really too broad to tell you anything actionable about where your marketing dollars and your time are actually producing results.

We track lead sources with extreme granularity at the Spears Group. Meaning if you met someone at a dinner party and that’s where the relationship originated, the dinner party is the lead source. It doesn’t matter that six months later, they emailed you about listing their property. The origination point was that party, and you need to know that because it tells you which activities and which investments are actually filling your pipeline.

When we applied this level of specificity to Jonathan’s business, we found that repeat clients were the most productive segment by a significant margin. So we asked the next question: where are those repeat clients engaging with us? What’s keeping Jonathan top of mind?

The answer was direct mailers. Even for clients we’d already closed with, sending them mailers about what we’re doing and what’s happening in the market was keeping the relationship active.

That was a fact I could point to when it came time to decide whether we keep investing in direct mail. The answer was obviously yes, and I could back that decision into real data instead of basing it on a feeling.

On the Spears Group team side, the picture was completely different. Our highest-converting lead source last year was internet leads coming through our Luxury Presence website.

When I saw that data, the next conversation was straightforward: we should invest more in SEO, invest more in the site, and double down on a channel that’s clearly converting. I felt confident making that financial commitment because I had numbers telling me it was working. I wasn’t guessing.

Audit your lead source categories this week. If you have a bucket called “sphere” or “referral” that contains more than one type of origination, break it apart. You’ll start seeing patterns you’ve been missing, and within a quarter, those patterns will change how you allocate your marketing budget.

Cost per agent is the metric nobody talks about

This is the one I’m most passionate about, because I think it’s the single most overlooked number in team-based real estate.

When it comes to running a team, most leaders push all their financials together. Jonathan’s personal production income goes in the same bucket as the team’s income. Jonathan’s expenses go in the same bucket as the team’s expenses. And when you do that, you really can’t understand how either side of the business is performing on its own.

So one thing we track at the Spears Group is cost per agent. Meaning, what does it cost us to have each agent on the team relative to the earnings they bring in and the expenses they incur?

When you can see that number clearly for each person, you can set financial goals that are specific to each segment of the business. You stop setting one blanket revenue target and hoping the math works out.

Before we had this data, there were parts of the team that looked busy and productive. Closings were happening. Agents were active. But when we ran the cost-per-agent analysis, busy agents could make more than they were generating in return. That’s the kind of truth that never surfaces when everything is lumped together. And it changed how we structured the business, how we allocated resources, and how we thought about where to grow next.

If you lead a team of any size, separate your financials into at least two views this month: the team leader’s personal production and the team’s production. Then go one level deeper and calculate what each agent costs versus what they earn.

I promise you will make better decisions within 30 days of having that visibility.

Data should empower your agents, too

One thing I feel strongly about is that this financial visibility shouldn’t stop at leadership. A lot of times in the real estate industry, the team leader and the operator have access to all the tracking, all the business data, all the financial picture. And then the agents are in the dark.

They’re cold-calling and holding open houses, but they have no idea how their business is actually performing. They can’t tell you their net income, their cost structure, or which of their activities are generating the best return.

At the Spears Group, we give agents the same financial backend that leadership sees, tailored to their own earnings and their own performance. I want to empower them to be business owners within the business.

Because at the end of the day, if an agent understands their own numbers, they make better decisions. They’re more engaged. They’re more invested in the processes. And they start to see themselves as entrepreneurs running a real operation, which is exactly what they are.

I think any team leader would want that for their agents. Most just haven’t taken the steps to make it happen. And when they do, the entire culture of the team shifts. People stop waiting for the next lead to come down from the top and start building something of their own.

Stop swimming in the dark

Jonathan always talks about how he used to run his business on feelings. He felt like things were going well. He felt like certain marketing channels were working. He felt like the team was in a good place. And most of the time, those feelings were close enough to reality that he never questioned them.

But “close enough” is where growth goes to die. Close enough means you’re leaving money on the table every quarter. It means you’re investing in channels that feel productive but might not be. It means you have agents on your team who look busy but are costing you more than they return, and you’ll never know it because you never separated the numbers.

I won’t make a financial decision that I can’t back with data. That’s a rule I hold for myself and for our business. And I think the reason our industry has been slow to adopt this kind of discipline is that the volume numbers look so good. They’re big, they’re impressive, and they’re easy to talk about. The harder conversation is what’s underneath them.

So here’s what I’d leave you with. This week, pull three numbers: your net income for the last quarter, your most granular lead source breakdown, and if you run a team, your cost per agent. Just those three. You don’t need a new platform, a consultant, or a weekend retreat. You need a spreadsheet and an honest hour with your own data.

What you find will change how you run your business.