“I want to make six figures this year” is a lovely sentence. It’s also not a plan.
It’s a wish with a dollar sign. And wishes are great for birthday candles, but they don’t tell you how many listing appointments to book in March.
The fix is to run the math backward. Start with what you want to take home, then work your way down to deals, then to conversations. It sounds tedious. It’s actually kind of a relief, because once you see the numbers, the year stops feeling so foggy.
Set a realtor income goal you actually keep
This is where a lot of agents trip up. They set a goal based on gross commission and forget everything that comes out of it before it reaches their bank account.
So begin at the end. How much do you want to actually take home? Then add back what comes out before that. Your brokerage split. Any team split or referral fees. Your business expenses (marketing, MLS dues, that phone bill, gas). And, please, a chunk set aside for taxes, because the tax bill shows up whether you planned for it or not.
That gives you the gross commission income, or GCI, you need to bring in. It’s almost always higher than the number you started with. That’s normal. Better to know now than in December.
Figure out what one deal is worth to you
Next, look at your average commission per closing. If you’ve been in the business a while, your own past closings are the best guide. If you’re newer, you can estimate using typical prices in your market and your expected commission rate.
Here’s a made-up example just to show the shape of it. Say you need a certain GCI, and your average deal brings in about a tenth of that after your split. That means roughly ten closings. Swap in your own numbers and the same logic holds.
Not every deal will be average, of course. Some will be bigger, some will be the tiny condo that took more work than a house twice the size. The average just keeps you pointed in the right direction.
Then go one more step back
This is the part people skip, and it’s the most useful.
Deals come from appointments. Appointments come from conversations. So if you know roughly how many conversations it takes you to get an appointment, and how many appointments turn into closings, you can turn “ten deals a year” into “this many calls and coffees per week.”
Suddenly the goal is something you can put on a calendar. Something you can actually do on a Wednesday.
If you don’t know your conversion rates yet, that’s fine. Make a reasonable guess, then start tracking. Your real numbers will show up within a few months, and you can adjust.
Revisit it more than once a year
A plan you look at once in January doesn’t help much by July. Check in monthly. Are you on pace? Ahead? A little behind because spring was slow? Each answer tells you something about what to do next.
Let the sheet do the math
If you’d rather not build all this yourself, I made a Real Estate Agent Income Worksheet that works backward from your income goal to the deals you need. It’s a commission planner and GCI goal tracker in Google Sheets.
Either way, go find your number. The real one, after taxes. It’s a little sobering and a lot more useful than the birthday-candle version.