Real estate commission is the sale price times each side’s rate. A $400,000 home at 2.5% a side pays $20,000: $10,000 to the listing side’s brokerage and $10,000 to the buyer side’s. An agent’s take-home is what’s left of their side after the brokerage split, any team split and flat fees.
Total commission
$20,000
Listing side $10,000, buyer side $10,000
Each new lead is worth
$175
If 1 in 40 leads closes, you can pay up to $175 a lead before desk fees and taxes.
The numbers above are an example. Change any of them to yours.
Your side, minus your brokerage’s cut, minus your team’s cut of what’s left, minus flat fees, is your take-home. The two splits multiply, so it doesn’t matter which comes first. A flat fee is different: when it comes out changes what you pay. The calculator takes the whole flat fee out of your share. If your brokerage takes it off the top before the split, you pay only your part of it: $276.50 of a $395 fee at a 70% split.
A referral fee paid as a share of your side comes off before your split, so lower your brokerage split to match. With a 25% referral fee and a 70% split, enter 52.5 (70% of the 75% that’s left). The calculator leaves out what doesn’t come off every deal, like monthly desk fees and taxes.
Most leads don’t close, so your take-home on a deal isn’t what a lead is worth. Divide it by the number of leads it takes you to close one deal and you get what each lead brings in, on average, before anyone has spoken to it. That’s also the most you can pay for a lead before desk fees and taxes. Pay more than that per lead and the source loses you money, however good the deals feel.
Work it out one source at a time. Take last year’s leads from the source you’re pricing, like a lead vendor or your website form, and divide by the deals those leads closed. Leave out referrals and past clients. You aren’t buying those, and mixing them in makes a bought lead look better than it is. If a source takes a share of the commission at closing instead of a price per lead, lower your brokerage split by it, as above, and leave the lead price empty.
Here’s a team agent on a $350,000 sale, buyer side, at 2.5%. The closing statement says $8,750. The brokerage split is 80/20, the team keeps half of the rest, and a $395 transaction fee comes out of the agent’s half. The agent takes home $3,105.
| Same deal | 1 in 40 leads closes | 1 in 30 leads closes |
|---|---|---|
| Agent’s take-home | $3,105 | $3,105 |
| Each lead, to the agent | $77.63 | $103.50 |
| Each lead, to the team | $87.50 | $116.67 |
Going from 1 in 40 to 1 in 30 makes every lead worth a third more, to the agent and to the team. Whoever buys the leads should hold the lead price up against their own line. With a team split under 100%, the calculator shows both.
The sale price is the market’s and your splits are in your contract. Your rate you can negotiate, one deal at a time. The other lever is how many leads turn into deals, and that depends a lot on what happens after a lead comes in. That’s where the value of a lead leaks out.
In a 2014 WAV Group and Weichert Lead Network study of agent responsiveness, 48% of buyer inquiries were never answered, and the average response took more than 15 hours. In the 2007 Lead Response Management study of web leads at six companies, the odds of qualifying a lead were 21 times lower when the first call came at 30 minutes instead of 5.
Neither study says what calling faster would do to your close rate, and we won’t guess. But a lead nobody calls rarely closes with you, and it still counts in your leads per deal.
That’s the part we handle. Callingly’s AI Agent calls each new web lead within seconds during your team’s call hours, can text in the same sequence, and warm-transfers the live lead to an agent. When nobody’s free, it books a callback at a time the lead picks. See how it works for real estate teams.
The NAR settlement changed how the buyer’s side gets paid, which is why the calculator asks for the two rates separately. Since August 17, 2024, a buyer and their agent agree in writing how the agent is paid before they tour a home. A seller can still offer to pay the buyer’s agent, but the offer can’t go on the MLS. And in NAR’s own words, agent compensation “remains fully negotiable and is not set by law.”
So there’s no standard rate to plug in. Use the rates in your listing agreement and your buyer agreement.
Put a dollar figure on it first. On a $12,000 side, a 70/30 split leaves you $1,200 less per deal than an 80/20. If 1 in 30 of your leads closes, that's $40 less for every lead. So it's a good deal if what the brokerage gives you (leads, a brand, a transaction coordinator) is worth more than that to you.
Some will. Commission is negotiable, and NAR says so in writing. On a $500,000 sale, 2% instead of 2.5% on one side is $2,500 less for whoever pays that side. For an agent who keeps 80% and closes 1 in 30 leads, it's $2,000 less take-home and $66.67 less per lead.
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