The real estate brokerage business plan that actually forecasts profit.

Revenue in a brokerage is a downstream number. It falls out of three inputs: how many productive agents you have, how much they each produce, and what share of that production you keep. Set a twelve-month agent count target first — say 40 producing agents — and everything else in the plan becomes arithmetic instead of aspiration. Write the target as productive agents, not licensees on the roster. A roster of 80 with 25 transacting is a 25-agent brokerage with an 80-agent expense base.

Model a single average agent before you model the company. Take your market's median sale price, your average agent's annual transaction count, and your commission structure. An agent doing 8 transactions a year at a $400,000 median price and 2.5% gross commission produces roughly $80,000 in GCI. On an 80/20 split, the brokerage keeps $16,000 before any franchise fee.

Now subtract what that agent costs you: desk and office allocation, CRM and tools seats, E&O, training time, and broker support hours. If that number is $9,000, your contribution margin per agent is $7,000 a year. That single figure tells you how many agents you need to cover fixed overhead — and it is the number most business plans never compute.

Graduated splits, capped splits, and flat-fee models all work; mixing them incoherently does not. Graduated splits reward growth but compress your margin on your best producers. Capped models are attractive in recruiting conversations and predictable to forecast, but the cap has to be set against your real cost to serve, not against what the brokerage down the street advertises. Flat-fee models scale on volume and demand ruthless operational efficiency. Pick one, put the math in the plan, and stress-test it at 60% of your target agent count.

Agent count targets without a recruiting model are wishes. Work backwards: if you need 18 net adds this year and you lose 15% of your roster annually, you need roughly 24 gross hires. At a 20% close rate on qualified conversations, that's 120 qualified conversations — about 10 a month. That is a staffing and activity commitment, and it belongs in the plan with a name attached to it. See our guide on recruiting KPIs for the benchmarks that keep this pipeline honest.

List every cost that exists whether you have 10 agents or 100: lease, broker salary, admin staff, accounting, tech stack minimums, insurance, marketing base spend. Divide that total by your contribution margin per agent. If overhead is $210,000 and margin per agent is $7,000, break-even is 30 producing agents. Now you know whether your growth plan is a business or a hobby, and how much runway you need to reach 30.

Attrition is the most consequential assumption in a brokerage plan and the one most often set to an optimistic round number. Use your actual figure, and if you don't have one, use 20% and plan to beat it. A brokerage growing 24 hires a year against 25% attrition on a 60-agent roster is treading water at enormous cost. Model the plan at your current attrition and again at five points better — the gap between those two lines is usually larger than any recruiting initiative.

A brokerage that can hand a new agent qualified seller and buyer opportunities recruits at a structurally lower cost than one selling culture alone. If lead generation is part of your model, put its cost per lead and conversion assumptions in the plan as a line item, then treat the resulting agent productivity lift as the return. It is one of the few investments that shows up in both the recruiting and the retention half of the model.

A plan you don't measure against is a document. Reduce it to one page reviewed monthly: producing agent count, net adds, gross hires, attrition, GCI per producing agent, company dollar, contribution margin per agent, and cash runway. Eight numbers. If a metric isn't on that page, it isn't running the company — and if it is on the page and nobody owns it, it won't move.