The Importance of Tracking KPIs and Metrics in Real Estate Investing
Mastering real estate investing means tracking the right metrics. From cost per lead to ROI, these KPIs reveal where to invest and how to convert. Don’t guess—let the numbers guide your growth and profits.
As a real estate investor, you know that growing a successful business takes more than just hustle and handshake deals. To scale up and maximize profits over the long-term, you need to track key data and metrics about your business performance. But what specific metrics should you be measuring, and how can you use these numbers to gain insights and make smarter business decisions?
Why Tracking KPIs and Metrics Matters for Your Real Estate Business
KPI stands for "key performance indicator". These are the most critical numbers and metrics that shed light on the overall health and profitability of your real estate investing business.
Consistently tracking performance indicators and metrics like cost per lead, return on investment, deal conversion rates, lead follow up times, and more can provide substantial benefits:
- It shows how profitable your various marketing campaigns and lead sources are. This way you can double down on what's working well.
- Tracking conversion rates helps you pinpoint inefficiencies in how leads and deals are converting through your pipeline. If the data shows bottlenecks, you can optimize.
- Solid metrics make it easy to spot areas of waste or excess spending. You'll know exactly where to cut back.
- KPIs provide you with data-driven insights about your business. So you can make smart, informed decisions rather than relying on intuition.
- They help you set performance goals and benchmarks for your team to work towards.
Without monitoring these key performance indicators, it's nearly impossible to gain visibility into your real business health and know where you should focus on improving your investing business. You end up guessing based on gut feelings rather than leveraging cold, hard data.
4 Key KPIs and Metrics Every Real Estate Investor Should Be Tracking
While there are many potential KPIs and metrics you could track for your real estate business, a few vital ones include:
Cost Per Lead
This metric shows what your average cost is to acquire a lead across the different marketing channels and lead sources you use like direct mailers, Google ads, Facebook ads, bandit signs, etc.
To calculate it:
Total $ spent on marketing / Total number of leads
Having visibility into your cost per lead is crucial to determine which lead generation strategies and marketing efforts provide you with leads at the lowest cost. This way you can double down on what works. If a channel has a high CPL, it may not be worth the spend.
Lead to Deal Conversion Rate
This ratio shows what percentage of the total leads that enter your pipeline end up converting into actual deals closed.
To calculate it:
Total number of deals closed / Total number of leads
Tracking this conversion rate will shed light on how effective your business is at nurturing leads through your pipeline and converting them into deals. A low conversion rate signals inefficiencies in your follow up process.
Marketing Return on Investment (ROI)
Your marketing ROI metric measures the overall profitability of your marketing. It shows how much revenue is generated per dollar spent on marketing.
Use this formula:
(Revenue - Marketing Costs) / Marketing Costs
This return on investment KPI is great for showing which marketing channels provide the highest return. You want your overall marketing ROI to be at least 3-5X to be successful.
Time to Convert Leads
This metric shows how long it takes for your leads to convert into deals on average.
You'll want to track the average time from when a lead enters your pipeline to when they convert to a closed deal. Faster conversion times generally mean you have higher lead quality and efficient follow up processes. Slow conversion times can signal issues.
How to Track and Analyze KPIs in Your Real Estate Business
While it's possible to manually track your real estate KPIs and metrics using spreadsheets, doing this consistently and accurately is extremely difficult. The problem is scale. As your lead sources and deals grow, spreadsheet tracking becomes unrealistic.
The best way to track your real estate investing KPIs is by using software tools and CRM systems purpose-built for real estate investors. Solutions like ReSimply automatically track your key metrics across all your lead sources, marketing campaigns, and agents. This makes the process of analyzing the data simple.
With the data organized for you, you can clearly see metrics like:
- Which lead source has the lowest cost per lead
- Which marketing channel provides the highest ROI
- Which agents convert leads fastest
These CRM tools also make it easy to run reports on your KPIs. With a few clicks, you can pull up reports to spot trends and opportunities.
Leveraging this type of data-focused software empowers you to:
- Identify the optimal marketing mix based on hard numbers
- Double down on proven lead sources and campaigns
- Improve areas of underperformance
- Set and track performance goals for your team
In today's digital world, relying on spreadsheets and guesswork is no way to efficiently scale your real estate investing business. Use the power of data to unlock growth and profits.