RPE: The Number That Decides the Winners & Losers in Estate Agency - by Mark Burgess, CEO Iceberg
There’s a moment every few decades where an industry shifts so dramatically that the people who are paying attention quietly pull away… and the rest don’t realise what happened until the gap is so wide it’s basically permanent. Estate Agency is in one of those moments right now.
By Mark Burgess, CEO of Iceberg Digital
If you want to know the single fastest way to judge the health, scalability and future profitability of any agency, it’s this:
RPE — Revenue Per Employee.
Forget market share. Forget “we sold a house on that road once.” Forget who shouts loudest about being “No.1”.
Those vanity metrics belong in the same graveyard as the Nokia 3310.
RPE is what serious business owners look at, because it tells the truth.
And right now, I’m watching some agents transform their RPE so aggressively that it is becoming mathematically impossible for their competitors to keep up. That gap won’t close — it will widen, and widen, until only one of them is still standing.
Why RPE Matters More Than Ever
Every agency thinks the biggest challenge is stock and then selling that stock, it isn’t.
Every agency thinks the biggest challenge is fees. It isn’t.
Every agency complains about portals, or lazy buyers, or vendors with delusional price expectations.
Still not the problem.
The real challenge?
You’re trying to grow a 2025 business using a 2005 operating model.
If your staff are spending their days manually doing tasks that should be fully systemised, automated or data-led, then your RPE will always cap out. ALWAYS. No matter how many “great negs or valuers” you think you’ve got.
You end up in a world where:
More staff ≠ more revenue
More leads ≠ more completions
More viewings ≠ more instructions
Because human beings simply cannot compete with agencies who have built a real operating system, not a collection of fragmented tools and a CRM from the Jurassic era.
This is exactly what I wrote about in The Estate Agency Revolution — that agents are not building vital businesses. They’re clinging to old workflows while the world moves on without them.
And now with AI accelerating everything, that gap is becoming enormous.
The Agents Who Are Winning Are Not “Better Agents”… They’re Better Builders
Here’s what’s really happening in the background; the agents surging ahead have rebuilt their entire model around one thing:
👉 Reducing human effort in low-value tasks
👉 Increasing human effort in high-value tasks
👉 Letting the data, not guesswork, tell the team where the opportunities are
In my book Prepare I talk about how AI, automation and data fusion are creating businesses that literally think for themselves. The future belongs to those who embrace that shift early because technology compounds.
That’s exactly what’s driving the RPE explosion in the agencies we’re helping.
They’re not working more hours.
They’re not hiring more staff.
They’re not spending more on marketing.
They’ve simply removed the sludge.
The waste.
The admin.
The chasing.
The guesswork.
The “hope someone remembers to call that lead” culture.
Instead, their systems do the heavy lifting, and the humans do what humans are best at: winning instructions, negotiating deals, and providing real human value.
That is how you make an agency unstoppable.
Here’s the Hard Truth…
In every territory, there will be one winner.
Not because they’re nicer or cheaper and not because they’ve “been around since 1984.”
They will win because they have:
A unified operating system
Data intelligence
Always-on automation
AI-driven prioritisation
And a model that can scale without hiring more staff
When their RPE doubles, then triples, then quadruples… you can’t catch them.
You can’t out-recruit them.
You can’t out-market them.
You definitely can’t out-portal them.
By the time most agents realise what’s happening, it will be too late. The gap will be too wide.
If You’re Reading This Thinking “We’re Fine”… You’re Probably Not
I’ve spent the last two decades studying disruption, building AI systems, and watching patterns across thousands of agencies. And every time industries hit this stage, the same thing happens:
70% think they’re doing better than they are.
25% are vaguely aware they’re behind.
5% make the leap early and dominate everyone else.
You can see the early warning signs long before the collapse.
They’re obvious but only if you’re looking at the right numbers.
RPE doesn’t lie.
It shows you whether your business model is scalable or unsustainable.
It shows you whether you’re building an agency for the next 10 years or the last 10.
It shows you if you’re working smart or just working hard.
And most importantly:
It shows you whether you’re going to win… or be wiped out by someone who understands the power of their data.
If You Want to Know What Your RPE Should Be Let’s Talk
I’m not writing this to scare you.
I’m writing it because I’m watching agency after agency transform their business into something that would have been impossible even two years ago.
And the ones who act now are pulling away faster than anyone realises.
If you haven’t audited your RPE properly…
If you don’t know what good looks like…
If you don’t know what’s possible when your agency is powered by real data, automation and AI…
Then you need to before the gap becomes irreversible.
If you want to see where your RPE currently is, where it could be, and what the top performers are doing to get there book a chat with us.
This conversation could be the one that keeps you on the winning side of the industry’s future.
Because in this next era of agency, there won’t be “a few winners.”
There will be one. Make sure it’s you.
Book a call
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