Your best producer is the hardest person in the building to read

In a commission business, leadership watches one signal. Production. It is objective, it updates daily, it is already on a dashboard and it decides compensation, territory and standing. Nobody has to be told to look at it. The last four years made a strong argument against reading it that way, and the argument sits in this industry’s own data. Cost per loan climbed, and the leaderboard did not change Between 2021 and 2025, the cost to originate a loan rose from $8,664 to $11,094, roughly 28%, according to MBA’s performance reports. Across the front of that same stretch, loans closed per production employee per month fell from 2.5 in 2021 to 1.4 in 2022. On the residential side, NAR’s 2026 Member Profile puts the typical agent at nine transaction sides in 2025, down from twelve in 2022, while median hours worked held flat at 35 a week. Read those together. The board moved. The hours did not. A producer who held her numbers roughly level through that period was not holding level at all. She was absorbing a large and completely invisible increase in effort per unit, and the leaderboard recorded none of it. Compensation data says the same thing from the other direction. STRATMOR found ...