What are major indices that a real estate brokerage firm would like to see as a comparative?
Answers
What do you mean by "indices"? Are you talking about metrics? Internal or external? People productivity, office productivity or company productivity? Etc. More specifics will help.
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I was referring to external metrics specifically on different lines of business, i.e. - is there a place to find other company sales to compare to yours and national sales in residential, commercial, property
Top information sources - National Association of Realtors - Existing Home Sales, Pending Home Sales, Affordability Index, Median Home Prices and Affordability (http://www.realtor.org/research-and-statistics/housing-statistics/). See if you can get this information for your geographic area, as we know that housing is showing different results in various markets. The important point is that this information is assembled on a set schedule, which allows you to trend the results. Stay away from those one off articles that are infrequent and have inconsistent data collection methods.
Assemble a scorecard which shows your activity vs. all competitors in your region vs national results. Are you performing at par, exceeding or falling below? Develop this scorecard on a set schedule and monitor your results.
Good luck.
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How do you find your competitors numbers if they are private companies?
Thank you - Bryan asked if I was asking about metrics - and yes I am - external measurments on lines of business. In order to compare whether a brokerage firm is performing not only up to its internal budget and plan but against another measurement. Do you have any thoughts or suggestions?
Well, this question relates to another question in the thread: how do you find competitors numbers if they are private companies.
Joseph gave some great input from his experience, but so far as "industry standard" metrics, I would go where the industry goes for such things: publicly traded comparable companies, trade shows where industry insiders and experts would be discussing business issues, or work with a consultant who specializes in the space. Also, there may be firms that do benchmarking in the space - have you looked?
If there are no public companies in your space, you'll have to go with #'s 2 and 3 in that list. There must be scores of consulting CFOs who know your space cold and would be more than happy to give you a few hours of consulting. If they show you the way, actually running the numbers may be easily doable in-house.