Posted by Nicolai Kolding
If you’re a broker, go grab your P&L. Look to see when the last year was that had GCI about the same as 2007 and then compare the two years’ percent retained (the percentage of GCI kept by the house after sales agents receive their “splits”). My guess is 2007 was worse. Maybe a lot worse.
This despite the fact that over the same time period most of your expenses, like rent, increased (thanks to nothing more than simple inflation, which is only slightly easier to control than death or taxes).
One solution I’ve seen savvy brokers apply to maintain profit margins is called commission plan indexing. The idea is pretty simple: each year, increase the dollar thresholds that make up the different bands of your commission plan(s) by some multiplier (usually the CPI).
For example: say you have only one commission plan for your office and it resets every January 1st. It goes as follows: each agent gets a 55/45 split on the first $50k of GCI, 65% for everything between $50k and $100k, and 75% on everything above $100k
Although most brokers have more complicated plans (and probably many of them), the concept of getting higher splits as production increases is very common so let’s work with this example.
Without indexing, your schedule stays the same year in and year out. But what if you increased the thresholds by only 4% every year? Your first band (where the agent gets 55%) now runs from $0 to $52k (not $50k) while the second band (where the agent gets 65%) is now from $52k to $104k. Fast-forward another year. The targets are now at about $54k and $108k. After year three they’re at about $56k and $112k. And so on. It’s not too dramatic a change from one year to the next but the cost of not doing this is ever-shrinking margins that get really uncomfortable over time.
Let’s look at what this example would mean for a couple 20-agent companies. Company #1 has twenty agents who each produce $60k GCI every year (pretty close to average production for the industry) for a total of $1.2mm GCI. Company #2 has 20 agents who each produce $125k GCI (therefore $2.5mm GCI in total).
With no indexing, Company #1 would make $520k (or 43.3%) of gross profits year after year while Company #2 would make $925k (or 37.0%) year after year. Unless you live in a world with no inflation, this means your “ins” are stable while your “outs” are rising. Result: less profits.
If the plans were indexed, then the broker could keep more to offset rising costs felt elsewhere. For Company #1, indexing would increase the percent retained from 43.3% to 44.4% over the 3 years. On Company #2, it would go from 37.0% to 38.5% (returning nearly forty grand to the company).
As margins get dangerously thin in these tough times we all need long-term solutions, not temporary fixes. Play with the math and see what it would do to your numbers. Happy indexing.
