KGCI: Real Estate on Air - 7 Essential Marketing KPIs for Scaling Your Real Estate Business

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

Summary:This tactical episode breaks down the seven vital Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) every real estate agent must track to move beyond guesswork. Dustin Brohm explains how to measure cost per lead, conversion rates, and client acquisition costs to identify which marketing channels are truly profitable. Agents will learn how to audit their current spend, identify "vanity metrics" that don't lead to commissions, and use hard data to make informed decisions on where to double down for maximum growth and scalability.

This is the seven marketing KPIs you must track in order to scale your business and ultimately sell a ridiculous amount of homes and not have the stress and the income rollercoaster that most agents experience. The real estate industry has failed to create a clear path to time and money freedom. Having helped over 5,000 families in my real estate career and coached thousands of agents to scale their businesses, I know what works and what doesn't. And my goal on this podcast is to share it all with you, the good, bad, and ugly of building a highly lucrative lifestyle business so you can focus on what truly matters in life. You won't find any hype or fluff on this show, just real world tactics and strategies that get results.

You just got to do the work. I'm going to do this in a way where I teach you my mindset around marketing systems in a real estate business. I just had this mindset of I wanted to build an actual business, meaning I didn't want everything in the business to rely on me. I wanted to generate leads while I was doing other things. The seven categories that we want to talk about is, and you'll see inbound, everything I obsessed over in my business was I had a bad experience with, I think I called like one expired seller outbound coal. And he was just so me. I just figured that path of coal calling, albeit it works.

I wanted a business based on attraction marketing. So I wanted business to come to me. The things we tracked in our business was inbound seller leads, inbound buyer leads, and inbound referrals. Those are the three buckets. What are you doing on the regular to generate inbound leads coming into your business? So those are three of the seven categories.

Then you have tracking your database. So total database, just keeping track of any G. that is penned or closed by lead source. Very, very important. And then we track total reviews. And then a bonus is just to track some of your social stats. So it's likely you'll have to go in here and modify some of this.

But let me go through this. I think this will be real helpful mostly so you can hear the way I think about marketing systems in a real estate business. And if you want to, I mean, the big promise of coming into our world more formally through a million dollar agent method is that in 90 days, we're going to. get you to two to three plus closings per month on inbound organic marketing. Install four lead gen levers in 90 days. Each of those four are good for one to two plus transactions per month over time as they

operationalize in the business. And that's how you get to 100 transactions in a year, working less hours than you do selling 10 homes a year and definitely less stress and definitely piles of more money. So if you ever want to come to our role, just go to a million dollar agent method.com. and just book in a call and we can have a chat about it. Quick seven minute video and then book in a call. You can see all of our reviews. We've got video testimonials and all that stuff.

So inbound seller leads, what are you doing? Do you have a direct response expired system? Do you have a direct response for sale by owner system? Motivated sellers. We've got a letter campaign for motivated sellers. New construction is a way to generate seller opportunities. That's one of our lead-in levers. And then we have an open house system that,

generates seller leads as well. So what do you have that's coming in? So these could be calls. We've got a little bit more advanced system here with, we have different tracking numbers in place and those sorts of things. But then you have form fills on your websites. Then we have direct straight up seller home eval. So in our emails, we'll have a call to action if you want the value of your home,

click here and those generate leads. And the difference between that and a seller form fill is that straight up, you have someone going to your website and they're filling out information to want to have a consultation with you. The usual problem of agents is that I need more leads. And I just mentioned five lead sources. Most of what we do in real estate B school is to set up the lead gen levers in your business that will bring in more listing opportunities than buyer opportunities.

Nothing wrong with buyers. We just do not believe, and I've seen over and over again, agents pay for buyer leads, and they have no sustainability in their business. And they're always a slave to that lead source. And generally, they're paying 30 to 40% overall to generate a closing. And our legion levers are 10% or below, right? So you've got to take care of the economics of the business. So same thing on the buyer side.

If you're watching this training and you're like, I have no inbound. If I was filling out this scorecard, it'd be 0,000,000. Okay, this is a quarterly scorecard. So there's 13 weeks in a quarter. And all you need to do is change the first Monday of the quarter. So let's just say this was 2025. You're setting this up for it's the first quarter. It's January 2nd is the first Monday.

And then you're just probably going to have to set up some, you know, change some of this or whatnot. But these are the goals weekly. So how many seller inbound leads do you want each week? How many buyer inbound leads and then inbound referrals, the goal per week? So same thing on the buyer side. Buyer inbound calls. So those are, you know, we advertise on our, it's a good example of this.

Like even the phone number on our website, on the buyer, you know, page or buyer search engine, we track that phone number differently than our yard sign calls. We do use open houses. It's not the favorite thing I would do if I had to go back into production, but because we have it seller-based, our goal with every open house is to generate two closings, one buyer and one seller. Works really, really well. It's our 250k annual GCI open house system, then chat buyer leads. So then you total those up. Inbound referral. Do you have systems in place to deliver a world-class experience to clients where the natural byproduct is what you want, which is referrals without having to beg for them. And we track that number separately. Database,

first system. We have members doing multiple seven figures of GCI per year from just this one system. So until you're doing over a million GCI, you are not done with your database. First system that we help people install is to build a database the right way, to feed it daily, and then ultimately communicate with it, at least a 60 touch system. So how many nurtures are you adding every day to the database? How many straight up people in your database? And then if you have a team, you're going to want to track theirs separately. And we would help our agents build their own SOI database,

and we would help them once a month communicate with it via a very personal item of value, a very personal touch. Like I'm reading this book or I went to this new restaurant or just something to add some sort of value to the database. For all your different lead sources, and we were doing, you know, three, four hundred plus transactions per year, you know, three to three and a half million GCI. And what we teach isn't necessarily, and oftentimes it gets confused for like, I don't want to build a team. I'm not going to come into your world. That's not what what this is about. My point here is that even if you want to build a business that provides time and money

freedom, you have to start thinking like a business owner. And I want you thinking in terms of like, okay, so I have these lead gen levers set up on my business and I'm going to get each of these legion levers to X homes per month. We were doing over 400 transactions per year and I only had about six legion levers set up. Right. So you want to think in terms of that way. So have some sort of naming system. And all you're doing here every week is just any closed or appended GCI from these. So let's say you added a deal this week. This is in thousand so 21,000 of gCI 35,000 nothing yet from we got away from mass media we did it not on a grand scale but it became massively expensive and just the ROI wasn't there but we did test it for

a while expires in fizzbos our clients for life our team we so only circle prospected around open houses to find sellers very low key almost like a personal not a public service announcement like a PSA like hey holding an open house on sat Saturday at 2 p.m. Why don't you stop by? We're going to open it up early for folks in the neighborhood where maybe someone looking to move to the name party. You can pick your new neighbor, right? So very low key, almost like a special VIP invitation. And then any referrals from vendors, and we would work our vendors pretty hard for referrals. You total your GCI there. And then reviews. We got away from Zillow 100%. As soon as Zillow made it clear that their goal is to extract as much

of our commission check as possible. I guess technically there's nothing wrong with Zillow per se, but they do want to get as much of your commission check as possible. And so, you know, right now they're averaging maybe 30 to 40 percent, even if you do a Zillow premiere, like a pay per lead. If you do Zillow Flex, it's like 30 to 40 plus percent at closing. It's not a sustainable economic model. You don't want to pay that much. So we got heavy into Google. And I sold this business, but I checked this system that I started in my real estate team back in the day. And this is maybe not quite 10 years ago, maybe seven years ago I started this Google focus, regularly get business from Google.

So that's the one. We've got a system. It's called Social Proof and we help you set up your Google Business profile. And someone in our community passively generates one transaction per month from her Google business profile just by setting it up the right way. And then so you want to track your total reviews. And then you want some sort of metrics on whether it's your website, your Instagram, or your Facebook. You want to know that we have our second legion lever we help agents build out is the agent brand

authority builder and basically expanding your footprint online, so your digital footprint. So database touch blueprint, good for multiple transactions per month, agent brand authority builder, at least one transaction per month. And then I would recommend, we help folks install two other lead gen levers inside the 90-day million-dollar agent method program. I would recommend expire direct mail system and then our for sale by owner system. Those are inbound seller opportunities, 20-25X ROI return and investment on those. So this is a shorter training here.

I wanted you to get a feel for how I think about marketing and systems and not paying for leads, not coal calling, more of a focus on inbound organic. If you go down the path of like letting someone else be a better marketer than you, you will never have freedom in your business. We talk to agents that are 20, 25, 30 years in the business and they're still looking. They get on a call with us, you know, and they'll ask like, so what leads are you selling? You know, it's like, ah, we don't sell leads. You don't want to buy leads. Trust me. Or it's like, I'd rather pay you 30% at closing rather than figure out how to build a marketing system myself. Think of the rationale on that. Those companies are exploding now. So essentially, they'll sell you a lead and say,

don't pay me now, pay me 30% at closing. You're like, that's amazing. I don't have to pay for it. Do that math. You want to get to two transactions per month. In that model, let's say you have an average $10,000 commission check and you're willing to pay 30% at closing. You're literally paying 30% of $10,000 for that closing. $3,000. And let's say you get to $2 per month for that lead source, $6,000 a month you are spending $72,000 a year for those 24 closings. That is not sustainable. There is no freedom in that. We can generate the same level or more within 90 days. The goal in a million-dollar agent method is to get you up to a two to three or add two-to-three plus transactions per month. If you already do one to two, it's to add two to three. If you're

running a team, build these systems out for the core team, but also you can help your agent add two to three plus transactions per month. Adding two transactions per month in our world, 10% is on the high end of what it will cost. Typically, it's closer to 5%. You can go from spending $6,000 a month on the pay per closing model to way less than $2,000 a month

for those same two closings. So it's just not even building the marketing systems for yourself. You'll own them forever. And we do that in 90 days. So if that's you, definitely want to have a conversation with you. go to million dollar agent method.com. Much love. We'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.