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Welcome to The Justin Landis Show, your real estate podcast about having conversations, building relationships, and creating freedom. This week it's just me. I'm going to walk you through a tool I made, well, Claude Code helped me make it, to help real estate agents visualize what their business is actually doing financially.
Here's where this came from. I recently had an agent tell me that in the future they wanted to make $500,000, sell 25 houses a year, work 30 hours a week, and have a staff that included an assistant, a marketing person, and a runner out on the street. I love that future, and it's available for this person for sure, but I wasn't sure the numbers worked. Numbers are hard to visualize, so today I'm going to walk through them slowly, more than once, so you can follow along. We'll also put this on YouTube if you want to see it visually.
I've been around a lot of agents who plan their day and their week really well. If you're a high producing agent, you have to. It's a reactive business, and you need to plan your lead gen time, your follow up time, even your time off. But a lot of those same agents haven't planned the actual business. The big picture questions: what are my goals, how much money am I trying to make, who am I working with, and where am I taking this great week of business over the long haul. I've been working through this with a group of agents at the Justin Landis Group, and I want to walk you through the same process.
Step One: The Ideal Year
Here's the question I start with. Picture us sitting together exactly one year from now, and I ask how the year went. You tell me it was perfect, not lottery-winning perfect, but everything in your business and personal life fell into place. The goals you had, you hit them. If you can pause and write this down, do it, it's powerful to get it on paper. If not, just think it through: what have I accomplished, how does it feel, who am I around, what income have I had, what have the clients been like, what am I set up to do next year.
Step Two: Stack Five of Them
Once you have that ideal year, the next question is what an ideal five years looks like, stacking year one, then two, then three, four, and five. To put that in perspective, Bolst has somewhere around 310 or 320 agents and a couple of offices right now. Five years ago, Bolst didn't exist. I'd never heard the word. A lot can change in five years. So ask the same questions on a five year horizon: what have I accomplished, who am I around, what have I earned, what have I invested in, what does my day to day look like, how many hours am I working.
Step Three: Find the Roadblock, Then Check the Math
Once you have that five year vision, there are two follow up questions I love. First, what's the biggest roadblock standing between here and there? That might be building more referral based business, making a first hire, dropping a side hustle, or changing a belief that's holding you back. Second, and this is the important one, is this actually a reality? I almost always see a contradiction in the end result people write down, and that's normal, because you're in dreamer mode, which is exactly where you should be. But when you actually run the numbers, the transactions, the income, the expenses, it usually doesn't math the way it was written. The exciting part is that there's almost always a real path to the same outcome, just with different numbers than you assumed.
Scenario One: Solo Agent With Full Support
Let's walk through real scenarios. This tool lets you plug in transactions per year, average sales price, staff expenses, other expenses, team splits if you're on a team, and hours worked per week, so you can see your dollar per hour too. I built three tabs: individual agent, small team, and mega team.
Scenario one is the agent who wants great business and great support: full time assistant, marketing and transaction coordination help, showing assistant if needed, relationship based business without heavy marketing spend. Twenty five transactions a year, starting at a $500,000 average price point, which is a bit above the Atlanta median. Staff cost, $120,000 a year, you could get that done for less, maybe $80,000 to $100,000 if you're tight, but we'll start at $120,000. Other expenses, brokerage, marketing, tech, office, car, signs, lockboxes, we'll put $40,000 there. Thirty hours a week.
Here's what that comes out to. Twenty five transactions at $500,000, 3% average compensation, gives you $375,000 in GCI. Already, you're not netting $500,000, you're starting at $375,000 before expenses. Take out the $160,000 in expenses and you're at a net income of $215,000. That's the mismatch. Full time assistant, marketing support, referral based clients, I love that vision. But if your income goal is $500,000, you're not getting there by trimming expenses. Even dropping staff cost to $100,000 only gets you to $235,000 net. You really have two levers: more transactions, or a higher price point.
Watch what happens if we raise the price point instead. Same 25 transactions, but at $750,000 average, GCI jumps to $563,000 and net income to $423,000. Still short of $500,000, so we go up to $800,000, still not quite there, then $900,000. At $900,000 average price point, 25 transactions, $120,000 staff cost, $40,000 other expenses, your net income clears $500,000. So the question becomes, if your average price point is $500,000 today, can you realistically get to $900,000 over five years? Definitely possible, but it needs a real strategy, since the market alone isn't going to appreciate that much in five years.
Or you can take the other lever. Keep the $500,000 price point and solve for transactions instead. The answer is around 45 transactions a year to hit that same net income. Then you ask yourself, is it easier to raise my price point, or increase my volume to 45 sales? Maybe the answer is a blend of both.
Scenario Two: The Lifestyle Agent
Scenario two is what I call the biggest dollar per hour, max lifestyle agent. This is someone who wants great clients, referral based business, a good price point, but does not want to manage an assistant, manage marketing, manage transaction coordination, deal with hiring, training, or the risk of someone leaving. This person is often a great fit for a team that offers full support. At the Justin Landis Group, for example, we have a 70-30 split model where you get full time marketing, listing management, transaction coordination, coaching, and office space, without having to hire any of it yourself.
Say the goal is $250,000 net, with no management and as few transactions as possible. Staff cost goes to zero since you're not hiring anyone. You'll still have expenses, car, computer, phone, so we'll put $20,000 there. Then you're paying a 30% split for all that support. At a $700,000 average price point, how many houses does it take to net $250,000? Not that many. Eighteen houses nets you $245,000. No hiring, no firing, no training, no benefits to manage. And working 30 hours a week, your dollar per hour comes out to $170. That's a strong number.
The main thing this path requires is about 18 closed personal referrals a year, generated through your own network, plus finding the right team with the right support model. Very achievable over five years, honestly achievable in two. And if you raise the price point to $1,000,000 average, the number of houses needed drops to just 12 or 13, which might be an even better path if you can deliver a high level of service at a higher price point.
Scenario Three: The Lean Team
Scenario three is the lean team, not a mega team, but an agent still selling personally while building a small team underneath them. People choose this path for two reasons: they want to mentor and lead, and they want to keep working their best clients while a team handles the ones that aren't an ideal geographic, timeline, or buyer-seller fit, without losing the relationship entirely.
Here's how the numbers work. Personal production: 20 deals a year at a $600,000 price point. Team size: three agents. Average deals per agent: 12 each. Team average price point: $500,000, since team members may be less experienced and not working the highest dollar clients. That's 56 total transactions, 20 personal plus 36 from the team. Staff and admin costs run higher here, since you're supporting four agents and more transactions, so we'll put $150,000 there, plus $60,000 in other expenses for things like team building.
Hours worked climbs too, since you're selling, hiring, training, and overseeing staff, not just producing. We'll use 50 hours a week here instead of 30. When you run the numbers, GCI comes out to right around $1,000,000, which sounds like the classic million dollar agent headline. But net income lands around $400,000. People on teams are almost never netting anywhere close to their top line GCI, because of staff and marketing costs. And this assumes you can generate all 56 transactions through relationships and your database. If a chunk of those 36 team transactions are coming from internet leads, farming, postcards, or mailers instead, your costs go up significantly, potentially five to ten thousand dollars a month in lead spend alone, which can push your total expenses up to $100,000 or more and drop your net well below what the solo agent with one assistant is netting.
If you want to maximize this lean team path, the real requirement is getting team members to consistently produce, in this example, three agents each averaging 12 houses a year. That takes real work to build. This path tends to be the best fit for agents who genuinely care about leadership and mentorship, and who will enjoy that work more than being heads down in transactions themselves.
The Mega Team, Briefly
There's a fourth tab in the tool for the mega team, the fully out of production model where your team members are the ones selling. I won't walk through the numbers today, but the short version: expenses are significant, since you need a full staff and real marketing spend to generate leads at that scale. Teams that look like they're bringing in $6,000,000 in GCI often net less than the solo agent with one assistant and a marketing budget, once every expense is accounted for.
Why This Matters
The whole point of this tool is pairing your future vision with the actual numbers, so you can pull the levers, transactions, price point, team size, expenses, and see in real time whether the future you want actually works financially. If you've never had someone sit down and walk through your numbers with you, you're missing out. I do this regularly with agents at Bolst, and I'd love to do it with you. Download the free tool using the link below this podcast, it's completely free, and I'd love your feedback. You can also book a free call at bolst.homes, click join, and we'll walk through your preferred future together.
All right, everybody, thanks for listening. Make sure to like and subscribe, and I'll see you again next week.
