Business Growth
Why Most Realtors Never Break 25 Deals a Year
There's a number almost every producing agent runs into, and it's usually somewhere between 20 and 30 transactions a year. The way you got to 25 is the exact thing stopping you from getting to 40.
Courtney Kala, Realtor and coach, Lady Legacy · September 6, 2026 · 5 min read
There's a number almost every producing agent runs into, and it's usually somewhere between 20 and 30 transactions a year.
You hit it, and then you hit it again the next year. Not because you got lazy. You're working more than you ever have. The problem is that the way you got to 25 is the exact thing stopping you from getting to 40.
I've watched this happen to genuinely talented agents. I've also lived it. Here's what's actually going on.
The ceiling is a capacity problem, not an effort problem
Twenty-five deals is roughly what one person can hold in their head.
At that volume you can remember who's looking, who's on the fence, and who said call me in the spring. You can run your business out of your phone and your memory and it mostly works. You're the lead generator, the showing agent, the negotiator, the transaction coordinator, and the marketing department.
Then a listing appointment lands in the same week as three subject removals, and something drops. Usually it's follow-up, because follow-up is the only task with no deadline attached.
That's the ceiling. It isn't discipline. It's arithmetic.
The agents who break through don't find more hours. They stop being the only place the business can happen.
The four things that actually change
I've compared notes with a lot of agents who went from stuck to scaling. It's almost always the same four things, in roughly this order.
Your database has to become an asset, not a contact list
Most agents at 25 deals have somewhere between 300 and 1,500 people in their phone and no real system for who gets contacted when.
A working database means every past client, every lead, and every sphere contact sits in one CRM, tagged by relationship and stage, with a scheduled next touch. Not a vague intention to reach out. An actual task with a date on it.
This is unglamorous work. It's also the single highest-return week you will ever spend on your business.
Follow-up has to survive your bad weeks
Everyone follows up well when they have time. The business is built on what happens when you don't.
That means written sequences, automated where it makes sense, so a lead who registered in March still hears from you in June without you remembering. It means accepting that most people are not ready now, and building for the twelve to eighteen month window instead of the two week one.
If your follow-up depends on you feeling motivated, you don't have follow-up. You have good intentions.
Something has to come off your plate
The first hire is almost never a buyer's agent. It's administrative help.
Transaction coordination, listing paperwork, scheduling, and compliance filing are the tasks that consume the most hours and require the least of your specific skill. They're also the tasks whose absence quietly kills deals, since a missed subject removal date is a real problem and a missed prospecting hour is an invisible one.
Most agents wait far too long here. If you're consistently doing twenty or more deals and still building your own feature sheets, that's the constraint.
Lead generation has to stop being reactive
At 25 deals, most agents are living on referrals and repeat business, which is a good problem until it's a flat one.
Growth requires at least one lead source you control and can turn up. Past client outreach, a genuine sphere strategy, open houses run properly, builder relationships, or content. It does not have to be paid leads. It does have to be deliberate, and it has to happen in the weeks you're busy, not just the weeks you're worried.
The part nobody warns you about
Here's what makes this hard, and it isn't tactical.
Everything above costs money and time before it produces anything. You hire an assistant and your income goes down before it goes up. You spend a week cleaning your database and close nothing that week.
At 25 deals you're usually earning well enough to be comfortable and not so well that a bad quarter doesn't hurt. That's a genuinely difficult place to invest from. Most agents know exactly what they should do and stall on doing it, not from ignorance but from reasonable financial caution.
The agents who get through it almost always have two things: a plan with real numbers attached, and other people around them who have already done it.
That second one matters more than it sounds. Working out delegation, compensation splits, and hiring timing on your own, from scratch, is slow and expensive. Comparing notes with agents a step ahead of you is the cheapest shortcut available.
What this looks like in practice
If you're sitting at the ceiling right now, the sequence I'd suggest is:
- Audit your last twelve months. Where did every closed deal actually come from? Most agents are wrong about this, and the answer changes what you invest in.
- Get everyone into one CRM. All of them, tagged, with a next action.
- Write your follow-up sequences once. Buyers, sellers, past clients, and long-term nurture. Automate the parts that can be automated.
- Cost out your first hire. Actual salary or contract rate, actual hours, actual tasks. Decide what production number makes it work.
- Pick one lead source you control and commit to it for six months rather than trying four for six weeks each.
None of that is complicated. All of it is the kind of thing that gets postponed indefinitely while you handle this week's transactions.
If you're at the ceiling and trying to work out what comes next, that's exactly the conversation I have most often. We'll look at where your business actually comes from, where your time goes, and what the realistic next step is. Sometimes the answer is that you're in the right place and just need to build systems, and I'll tell you that.
Book a call with Courtney or Kirsten
You can also grab the free templates and follow-up playbooks we use, no strings attached.
About Courtney Kala, Lady Legacy, eXp Realty
Courtney Kala is a REALTOR with eXp Realty and the founder of Lady Legacy, a community for women in real estate building businesses with multiple revenue streams. She has been selling real estate for six years and has closed more than 600 transactions. Courtney works with agents across Canada who want better structure, more leverage, and a business that doesn't depend entirely on their own production. Connect with her at ladylegacy.ca.
- production
- systems
- database
- hiring
- lead generation
Questions agents ask
- How many deals a year can one agent realistically do without help?
- Most agents max out somewhere between 20 and 30 transactions working solo, depending on how complex their deals are and how much of the transaction process they handle themselves. Past that, something is usually being neglected, and it's most often follow-up or database work.
- Should my first hire be an assistant or a buyer's agent?
- For most agents it's administrative help. An assistant removes hours of work that doesn't require your licence, while a buyer's agent adds capacity you then have to feed with leads. Adding a buyer's agent before you have surplus lead flow usually creates a second person waiting for business rather than two people producing.
- Do I need to buy leads to grow past 25 transactions?
- No. Plenty of agents scale on past clients, referrals, sphere marketing, open houses, and builder relationships without paid leads. What matters is having a source you control and work consistently, rather than the source being paid or organic.
- How long does it take to break through the ceiling?
- Realistically twelve to twenty-four months from the point you start building systems. The database and follow-up work produces results on a lag, since you're planting relationships that mature over the following year. Agents expecting a change within one quarter usually abandon the work before it pays.
- Does changing brokerages help an agent break through?
- It depends entirely on what the change gives you. A higher split alone won't move you past a capacity ceiling, since the ceiling is structural rather than financial. What can help is access to training, systems, and other agents who have already scaled, which is worth evaluating separately from the commission structure.
Want to talk this through with someone who has done it?
Book a 20 minute call with Courtney. No pitch deck, no pressure, just a straight conversation about where your business is and what would actually move it.
