The Real Estate Acquisition Metrics That Actually Matter

A One-Page Framework for Agents Who Want to Know If Their Marketing Is Working (or Just Burning Money)

ps - if you want us to build and run the entire system for you, book a call: [

Most agents can quote one number from their marketing.

 And that number is almost always the one their agency chose to report.

It is not the number that tells you whether your marketing is producing listings. It is the number that makes a spreadsheet of unworked contacts look like a result. Every agent who has paid an agency for six months and closed nothing has seen a cost per lead report that looked fine. 

The leads were cheap. Nothing happened. The agency moved on.

There is a chain of numbers between a form fill and a closed transaction. Each one answers a different question. Miss one link and you cannot tell where the system is breaking, which means you cannot fix it. You just cancel the agency, conclude that online leads do not work, and go back to waiting for referrals.

This framework gives you every number in that chain, what each one means, and what a bad reading tells you to do next.

Every acquisition system, whether you run it yourself or pay someone else to run it, produces five measurable outputs. They run in order. Each one depends on the one before it.

 How efficiently your ads are turning ad spend into form fills.

Total ad spend divided by total leads generated
= Cost Per Lead

 Comparing creative angles, offers, or targeting windows against each other. Useful for optimizing the ad itself. Not useful for deciding whether your marketing is working overall.

"My cost per lead this month was $18. Last month it was $31. The new home valuation offer is pulling better."

 CPL is a creative and targeting metric, not a business metric. A low CPL on leads nobody answers is a waste. A high CPL in a market where the average commission is $20,000 can be completely rational. Use it to improve the ad. Stop using it to judge the system.

❌ "My CPL is $6, the campaign is working."

✅ "My CPL is $6. Now let me check what happened to those leads."

The number alone tells you nothing about revenue. It tells you about efficiency at one step.

 The percentage of leads your team actually reached and spoke to.

Leads contacted (live conversation, not voicemail) divided by total leads
= Contact Rate (expressed as a percentage)

 Diagnosing whether a speed-to-contact or follow-up depth problem is killing your pipeline before qualification even starts.

"We generated 40 leads last month. We had a live conversation with 14 of them. Contact rate: 35%."

 Industry research consistently shows that contact rate collapses when the first call happens more than five minutes after the form is submitted. It collapses again when follow-up stops after two attempts. A low contact rate is almost never a lead quality problem. 

 The fix is speed and persistence, not a new ad.

 A contact rate below 30% almost always means leads are being called once or twice and abandoned. The leads are not bad. Nobody worked them.

If your contact rate is low, changing the ad will not fix anything.

 Of the leads you actually reached, what percentage were genuine sellers worth booking.

Qualified leads divided by leads contacted
= Qualification Rate (expressed as a percentage)

 Identifying whether your offer is attracting the right homeowners, or pulling in curiosity clicks with no real intent.

"We spoke to 14 people. 6 of them had a property they were thinking of selling within 12 months and were willing to meet. Qualification rate: 43%."

 A low qualification rate points to one of two things: the offer is too broad and attracting people with no real intent, or the qualification criteria are set too tight and real sellers are being screened out. Both are fixable. A very high qualification rate (above 70%) sometimes means the criteria are too loose and unqualified people are getting into the calendar.

Qualification rate is where offer design and calling quality intersect.

 What a booked, qualified, in-person seller appointment actually costs you, all-in.

Total ad spend divided by total qualified appointments booked
= Cost Per Appointment

 This is the number to use when evaluating whether your marketing is worth continuing. It is the business metric. Everything before it is operational.

"We spent $900 on ads this month. We booked 8 qualified seller appointments. Cost per appointment: $112.50."

 Cost per appointment is the number that connects your marketing to your revenue. At a $112.50 cost per appointment and an average listing commission of $10,000 to $20,000, one closed transaction produces a return that is not a close call. 

This is the number agencies avoid reporting because it requires them to be accountable for what happens after the lead is generated.

❌ "We generated 80 leads at $11.25 each."