We hired an independent market research company to survey 300 active real estate agents across the United States and Canada. These agents were asked questions on a wide variety of topics, including their marketing and spending habits.

In this blog, we'll walk through the spend results and reveal the intriguing insights we saw about top-performing real estate agents. (Hint: if you think they spend differently, you're right!)

First, let's take a look at what the average agent actually makes in a year:

We simplified the categories so we could better analyze their marketing and spend habits, and observe behaviour trends that emerged within different levels of success. These were the three GCI groups we reviewed:

• under $100,000
• between $100,001 - $300,000
• $300,001 and higher

One of the most apparent facts revealed by the data is that agents with a higher GCI also completed more transactions each year. In fact, 78% of agents with a GCI below $100k had fewer than 10 transactions, while 63% of agents who made over $300k completed more than 25 transactions.

This was interesting and it reinforces the data we see in sources like REAL Trends 500, where the number of transaction sides is considered a primary indicator of agent success.

We also wanted to see how much real estate agents are spending on their marketing each year, and where they put those dollars. As it turns out, 53% of Realtors actually spend less than $5,000 on their marketing.

But when we broke it down by GCI, we saw another clear trend: top producing agents were spending significantly more on their marketing efforts. In fact, 52% of agents with a GCI over $300,000 spent over $20,000 per year, with 20% of these top producers spending more than $80,000 on their marketing each year.

Of course, as a digital technology company, we were interested in seeing how much of those budgets were going to web platforms specifically. The trend was almost identical to generic marketing spends, with investments increasing significantly alongside GCI.

Real estate agents making less than $100k were most likely to spend under $2,000 per year, while the majority of Realtors in the $300k+ group invested at least $5,000 and 32% had spent over $10,000 on their platform.

All in all, the market research was intriguing. We learned that top-performing agents had a higher volume of transactions and also invested significantly more marketing dollars into their business. When it comes to real estate, the old phrase "you have to spend money to make money" very well may be true.