The Money Debrief — What Your 2025 Numbers Are Really Telling You About Your Real Estate Business

Let’s talk about the numbers most agents avoid — and why they’re the key to your next-level income.

In this episode, I’m walking you through a shame-free, CEO-style financial review of your 2025. We’re talking GCI, net income, real hourly rate, profit leaks, and the sneaky places your money got lost (hi, unused subscriptions and panic-bought leads 👋).

You’ll learn how to:

• Calculate your real hourly rate
• Track where your money actually went
• Identify what made you money with the least stress
• Build a 2026 money plan based on data — not guesswork

This is not about judgment. It’s about clarity.

Because when you know your numbers, you take your power back — and that’s how profitable, joy-filled real estate businesses are built.

🎁 Grab the free Deal Dashboard I mentioned in this episode here: happyagent.co/dashboard

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Money Debrief Setup
• 2:10 Why Profit Beats GCI
• 4:13 The Seven Numbers To Track
• 5:50 Free Deal Dashboard Offer
• 5:54 Calculate Your Real Hourly Rate
• 7:39 Spotting Profit Leaks
• 10:54 Cutting Costs And Getting Profitable
• 12:37 Double Down On High-Yield Channels
• 15:04 Build A Data-Driven 2026 Plan
• 16:39 Step-By-Step Revenue Math

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:08

All right. Hi, friends. For those of you who don't know me, hello, I am Lindsay Dreyer, the founder and head coach at Happy Agent Co. I am also a brokerage owner and a mom of three. So we don't have time to fool around, right? If you have not reviewed the podcast, can you please? That would be the best Christmas present you could ever get me. And without further ado, let's dive in to our episode today, which is the money debrief. This is all about what your numbers are actually telling you. Now, I know some of you are like, girl, I don't want to talk about my numbers. And that is totally fine because most agents actually avoid looking at their numbers because they think they're like moldy leftovers in the fridge. And I'm not one of those people who actually eats unmuldy leftovers, to be honest. And I know that it's not because you don't care, but it's because you're scared or maybe you don't even understand how to look at them. But I want you to know this that your numbers are not an indicator of whether you are a good or bad person, whether you are a good or bad real estate agent. They are not judgment, they are information. So when you know how to read them, that information becomes power. I truly believe it. So today we are going to do your 2025 money review, the way that I do it as a real deal agent CEO, with zero shame, simple math, and hopefully very practical insights. So let's get you clear and in control. So your 2026 plan is built on data and not just winging it. All right, so let's talk about why your GCI, and for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, yes, it's another one of those realtor acronyms. GCI is your gross commission income. So this is the commissions that basically get deposited into your account. So most people are just looking at that number, but what they really should be looking at is how much you kept uh and then what burned through your profit and what is draining you. Like we don't care if you had 350,000 GCI, if your expenses ate half of it and you were busting your ass to make that because it is not about how much you make gross. It is about your net profit. So your profit is actually the real story, or at least a big part of the real story. All right. So if you're listening on the go or you're in your car, you can just listen. But if you're at a desk or somewhere where you can write things down, I want you to write down these seven numbers: your total gross commission income, your net income. So this is after expenses and taxes. I want you to write down your number of transactions. I want you to calculate your average sales price, your average commission per deal. And then we are going to estimate your expenses for the year, or if you actually have your expenses because you are tracking them throughout the year instead of just cramming at tax time, that would be great. And your estimated hours worked per week. So we want to gather all this information. Now, if you do not have a way that you are tracking this information, I am going to make this super easy for you. I have a free deal dashboard, which is going to allow you to track all of these numbers I just named. And then it is also going to give you a dashboard, which is going to show you where you're at throughout the year. It's going to track all the information you need to really be the CEO of your business. You are going to see what is closed, what is pending, what your GCI is, how many deals you've done, what your average sales price is, what your average commission is per deal. So that is in the show notes. So definitely check it out. And if you are just so thirsty you need to get it now, you can go to happyagent.co slash dashboard. And I will mention it a few times throughout this episode. We're going to move on to calculating your real hourly rate. So this is a formula that I think really puts a lot of things in perspective, which is your hourly rate. So it's super simple to calculate. You just take your net income and you divide it by the total number of hours you worked this year. Now, no real estate agent I know truly works 40 hours a week, day in, day out. It flucts based on your market, based on what's going on. So just guesstimate. But when I show this to agents or agents actually calculate this, they're like, oh damn, like I have a pretty high hourly rate. Or they're like, oh my God, are you kidding me? I'm making like$3 an hour. So either way, no matter which end of the spectrum you're on, this is a total wake-up call. So then once you have this number, I want you to ask yourself, where am I doing$50 an hour tasks or$20 an hour tasks, scheduling showings, running to lock boxes, formatting a newsletter. And then ask yourself, where are you doing those$500 an hour tasks or whatever the higher number is for you in your market, like negotiating, pricing strategy, high-level client care, growth planning. This is the thing. You may not be able to hire a full-time assistant tomorrow, but you could potentially outsource five hours to somebody next week and immediately free up time to focus on those higher dollar value tasks. And I know a lot of you like, no, I can't, but you could. If you are selling real estate, you can probably make this work. If you are feeling overwhelmed, you could probably make it work. So now that we've got our numbers tracked, we've got our hourly rate calculated, I want to dive into where you leaked profit. And this is where I am like your bestie, who's maybe gonna be a little real deal with you, because real estate agents are notorious for buying the bright new shiny object. We throw money after the most ridiculous stuff because it's sexy and we think it's going to make getting business easier. We think it's going to do XYZ. Like we honestly, I've never seen a group of people who are searching for the freaking magic wand. And I just hate to tell you people, there literally is no magic wand. I believe in magic, but there is no magic wand in real estate. So let's talk about where your money went. So I want you to ask yourself, did you panic by a bunch of leads that you never followed up with? So did you sign up for Zilla Flex or whatever? Um, and you just homes.com, realtor.com, whatever, pick your poison. Did you buy the leads and not have a clear system for following up with them? Did you spend$200 on technology that you don't even use? Or worse, do you have like five$10 a month pieces of software that you don't even use? Because those are the like really bad ones because you don't even really notice because you're like, oh, that's$9. That's not a big deal. Did you give every client a$300 closing gift to prove that you're the best instead of literally just doing a great job and then following up with them after they moved in? Or maybe it's just spending money on farming, which honestly, farming works if you do it right. But maybe you just were like, I'm sending a bunch of postcards and I'm not getting any business from it. That's telling you something. So this isn't like you're bad with money. You're a human being, you have a business, you want it to do well, but we need to hold that money accountable. So these are not mistakes, they are just little hints at where your profit is leaking and where you can cut it. I am gonna be honest with you. Two years ago, my brokerage was losing$150,000 a year. It was not a comfortable place to be. So I had to get real with myself and look at where was my profit leaking. And I was cutting, I was ruthless. It was if it didn't affect the client or agent experience, I it was getting cut. And I will tell you like we're back to profitable. Like this year, we're gonna have six-figure profit, which is amazing. But like, we are back, and it took that ruthlessness of holding every penny that I was shoveling out the door and holding it accountable to what was it doing for my business? And I want you to do the same thing. If you're sending those magazines every month or every other month, have they sparked conversations? If they haven't, and you get no response from them, they're useless. They are not doing their job. And you should be investing that money in something that is going to get you conversations, get you business. All right, jumping off my soapbox, I swear I like really love to jump on the soapbox. Let's talk about what made you the most money with the least amount of stress or like the least amount of energy. This is the part where it really starts to get juicy. I want you to go back and I want you to look at where your easiest, most profitable, most joyful business came from. Was it referrals from past happy clients? Was it your agent network? Was it a client appreciation event? Was it a like off-the-cuff Instagram post that went viral? God, don't we all wish that would be the case? Was it a simple and consistent email newsletter? I'm telling you, this simple consistent email newsletter has been really working for me lately. I want you to find where the gold is coming from because those are your people pillars and we are going to dive more into attracting clients that are aligned in our next episode. And honestly, they deserve more attention in 2026 than just throwing money at stuff that doesn't work. So we've evaluated a lot, right? We looked at our GCI, we looked at our net income, we've looked at our number of transactions, average sales price, average commission per deal, what your hourly rate is, where you were leaking profit, and where your money wasn't being held accountable in 2025. And then we're also looking at where is that income that is just not so hard won. Because yes, we do have to work. Obviously, real estate is a very hard job sometimes. Like we are hustling, we are grinding, and I'm not even gonna pretend that we aren't. But you have to find those people that you are just the magnet for. And that is really what makes this business so fun and so enjoyable. And so holding your money accountable and then investing in how do you get more of those types of people is really powerful. And again, we'll dive into how you do that in the next episode. So hopefully you stay tuned next week. All right, let's talk about your money plan for 2026. So we are not gonna just pull random ass numbers out of the air, like I'm gonna make half a million dollars and do 40 deals. I really want you to build a revenue plan. And I want you to build this based on your actual capacity, the way that you actually want to feel in your business, the clients that you want to work with, what your real hourly rate is and the work that you're actually doing. So I have a few questions for you. If you haven't noticed, these are very like reflecting time of year. Like I just believe the winter time is like the best hibernation season. So, what do you want to repeat in 2025 when it comes to your money? What do you want to stop when it comes to your money? Like, what do you need to hold accountable and just put on the dropping block? What deserves more investment in your business? Like, where have you been holding back? Where maybe you need to like invest the$2,000 and hold that client appreciation event? Maybe you need to invest in a CRM. Maybe you need to invest in some training. Maybe you need to invest in a new car. I don't know. You know, you know where you need to invest. And then if you're at a point in your business where you need to start automating or delegating things, what needs to be automated, what needs to be delegated? And then that allows you to start setting some real revenue targets and putting together a real money plan. All right, so let's talk about building out a real goal based on actual a money plan, like an actual mathing, including brokerage splits, expenses, and taxes. So I'm gonna walk you through this step by step. You can grab your calculator or just listen along and plug the numbers in later. So step one is deciding how much you want to take home in 2026. This is your actual income goal. This is what you want to keep and live on after you run your business and your taxes are paid and the brokerage takes their split. So let's say you want to take home$100,000 in 2026. That's great. That's your goal. So we've got step one, squared away. Step two is you're going to divide that by whatever percentage you are setting aside for business expenses and whatever percentage you're setting aside for taxes added together. So in this example, I am going to say 15% is for business expenses and 25% is for taxes. So adding those numbers together, that's 40%. So I'm going to divide my take-home goal of$100,000 by 60%. Now you might be like, Lindsay, but it's 40%. So you basically take 100%, subtract whatever your business expenses and taxes percentage is, and that's gonna give you what you divide it by. So 100% minus 40% is 60%. So that's what we're plugging into that formula. So that gives me the gross commission, and this is after your brokerage split. So this does not fake factor in brokerage split. If you want to factor that in, you can. So this is saying that I need to bring home that I need to make gross commission 166,667 to hit my take home goal of$100,000. Now, step three is you're gonna figure out what your average commission per deal was. So just look at your past closings. What was your average sales price commission rate after your split? So let's just say it's$10,000 per deal in this scenario. So now you're going to find your deal goal. This is your transaction goal. So you'll take your GCI goal, and then you're going to divide it by whatever your average commissions are. So in this example, it's$166,000,$667 divided by$10,000, which is our average commission. So we're gonna get a 16.7 deals. So we'll round that up to 17. So my goal for 2026 is that I have 17 closings with a gross commission of 100. I'm gonna round this up,$167,000, which means I will take home$100,000. So you can break this down however you want. I personally like scattering the 17 deals throughout the year, kind of like when I think I will do them. I know for May, June, July, those tend to be high closing months. And then it pops up again in September, October, November. So sprinkle those out, kind of give yourself a little projection on when you're going to do those deals. So this is essentially how you are creating your 2026 money goals. And a lot of it is just tracking it as well. Like, so definitely have a way that you are tracking your deals. I don't know many agents that actually have a spreadsheet of tracking their deals. This is something I make all my coaching clients do. So if you want to have a spreadsheet, definitely download the free deal dashboard. That is going to be so much better than doing nothing. So if you want that free worksheet, it is in the show notes. You can also download it at happyagent.co slash dashboard. But this is what real CEOs of their business do. They know their numbers, they build their business around them, and they don't just wing it. And I really truly believe that a happy agent is a profitable one. So let's go make 2026 your most profitable year yet.