What your pipeline will pay you, worked out line by line

Your lender asks what you have coming in this quarter. Or your team lead does, or you do, at night, deciding whether you can afford the mailer. The quick answer is list prices times the commission rate, added up.

That number is gross. You will never be paid it.

$37,350

gross commission across three deals

$29,802.50

what lands in your account

$25,350

the total you get if the listing counts as $0

A hypothetical pipeline, worked through line by line below.

The worksheet below takes each open deal from a price to a deposit in seven lines. Do it once by hand on a real deal, and you will know which of your own numbers you have been rounding up.

Three deals, in the order they should close

A hypothetical pipeline, small on purpose:

1. A buyer under contract at $545,000, three percent, referred to you by an agent in another state for 25%. You charge a $395 admin fee. Closing first.
2. A listing at $480,000, two and a half percent. No offer yet.
3. A buyer still searching, on a $9,000 flat fee written into the buyer agreement, plus the same $395 admin fee.

The flat fee is ordinary now. Since Aug 17, 2024, a written buyer agreement has to state the amount or rate of compensation, or how it will be determined, and a flat dollar figure qualifies.

The brokerage side: an 80/20 split with a $16,000 annual cap, which is the structure eXp Realty publishes. Assume $12,500 of that cap is already paid this year, so $3,500 of room is left. Add a $250 transaction fee per deal. Use your own independent contractor agreement (ICA) for every one of these figures; this is arithmetic, not legal or tax advice.

The seven lines

Lines one, two, and six are clerical. Three and five are where pipelines lie.

The referral comes off first, before the brokerage sees anything. A quarter of that buyer deal's gross belongs to someone else. 25% is the most common referral rate, and offers run as high as 40%. Show that deal at $16,350 and you have overstated it by more than $4,000 before any split.

The split only runs until the cap fills. The buyer deal owes 20% of $12,657.50, which is $2,531.50, and there is room for all of it. That leaves $968.50. The listing would owe $2,400 and pays $968.50, because that is all the cap will take. The flat-fee buyer closes after the cap and pays no split at all.

Which means the same deal pays you differently depending on what closes ahead of it. If the listing expires, the flat-fee buyer inherits that $968.50, and its net drops to $8,176.50. Order matters. Write the deals down in the order you expect them to close, and redo line five whenever that order changes.

Line four is a judgment call your brokerage makes, since some split the admin fee and some let you keep it. This worksheet splits it.

Across all three: $37,350.00 gross, $29,802.50 net. The $7,547.50 between them is $4,087.50 of referral, $3,500.00 of split, and $750.00 of fees, less the $790.00 you collected in admin fees.

The total that skips the listing

Listings are where this breaks, because a listing's commission is a rate waiting on a sale. There is no dollar figure until someone makes an offer, so anything that only adds up dollar figures adds a zero.

Leave the listing out and gross comes to $25,350. Look at where that lands: below the real gross, and below the real net too. It reads like a careful, conservative estimate. It is wrong for a reason nobody can see from the number.

A blank prompts a question. A zero in a money column is an answer, and once it is summed into a total the gap disappears entirely. We shipped exactly this: our own transactions list once printed $0.00 for every percentage listing and added the zero into the total above it.

So price listings off the list price, and mark them as such. The sale price will differ, and you know it will. A number you know is an estimate beats one that is silently missing.

Weighting by stage is your call

Some agents weight each deal by how likely it is to close. That is judgment, not a formula, and the percentages below are illustrative:

Weight the net, never the gross. And remember that the cap line assumed all three close; a weighted total cannot show that $968.50 moving from one row to another.

Neither figure is income. A projection built on list prices is a statement about what you hope happens. Useful for deciding where to spend Tuesday. Nothing to spend yet.

At fourteen files, the worksheet stops getting done

Three deals take ten minutes. Fourteen, each re-priced every time one closes, slips, or falls apart, is the kind of chore that quietly stops happening, and the gross number comes back.

KeyFlow does the seven lines for every open deal. A listing with no sale price is priced from its list price, a searching buyer from the budget you entered, and a deal under contract from its contract price. Referral fees, admin fees, your company split, your cap, and per-deal fees come off in the same order as the worksheet, using the split and cap you set once in your settings. A deal your brokerage treats differently can take its own broker fee, as a percentage or a flat amount.

Each row shows net, with gross in small type beneath it. The active stage header counts your listings and buyers and totals their potential net; the contract stage totals its net, and the header is summed from the same numbers printed in the rows. Open a deal's financials and its split is priced at the cap position you will be in when it closes, counting the deals scheduled ahead of it.

It does not weight by stage. That part stays yours.

This week

Take your three biggest open deals. Write them down in the order you expect them to close, and fill in all seven lines for each, using the rates in your ICA and the cap figure your brokerage last reported to you. Then compare the net total with the number you gave the last person who asked.

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Sources: National Association of Realtors: what the settlement means for home buyers and sellers · Smart Agent Alliance: eXp Realty commission and fees · HousingWire: real estate referral fees