According to HousingWire, a clinical social worker who works with people in sales has made an important observation about how commission-based businesses like ours track performance. The real issue is that we're looking at production numbers on a daily basis, but those numbers don't tell us what's actually happening behind the scenes. Over the past several years, the mortgage industry has seen loan origination costs rise significantly while the number of loans closed per employee has actually declined. Meanwhile, real estate agents are closing fewer transactions than they were a few years ago, but they're still working the same number of hours each week. This means that producers who appear to be holding steady are actually putting in substantially more effort to get those results, and management wouldn't know it from looking at the leaderboard.
The compensation data makes this even clearer. Loan officers are earning roughly the same commission rates as they did a few years ago, but their actual annual income has dropped dramatically. So a producer might look like they're doing fine on paper when they're actually grinding much harder to earn significantly less money. The challenge is that production numbers lag behind reality in a way that other metrics don't, and this industry's own data already shows it. When things get tough, a commissioned producer's natural response is to work harder and push more volume, not to flag the problem to management. That's how the incentive structure works, and it's not a character flaw on the producer's part.
Rather than watching production numbers, managers should be paying attention to operational signals that surface much earlier. The author suggests watching for changes in work patterns like activity moving later into evenings or weekends becoming routine. Another signal is pipeline composition shifting to include more rework and more units required to hit the same dollar volume. Response times getting slower or shorter, less willingness to bring complicated files to a manager, and dropping discretionary activities like mentoring newer staff are all worth noticing. When a producer has a record month but then maintains that same intensity every single month without any letdown periods, that's a pattern that deserves attention too.
The way to approach this requires some care. Managers shouldn't open the conversation by commenting on production numbers, because that frames it as a performance issue and tends to shut down communication with someone who's already stressed. Instead, name the specific behavior you've observed. If someone has canceled the same trip twice or stopped bringing you files the way they used to, that's concrete and specific. Also, managers need to make sure that any support resources are separate from whoever controls compensation and leads assignments, because producers won't reach out for help if doing so might affect their splits or territory.
What I am seeing locally in the Bay Area and East Bay is that our strongest producers sometimes bear invisible workloads that our traditional metrics completely miss. When someone's production stays flat or even grows in a market like ours, they might actually be working at an unsustainable pace to get there. For our brokers and teams, this means we need to get smarter about retention and management. The industry has seen significant turnover, and much of it probably could have been prevented if managers had noticed the earlier warning signs before a producer burned out or moved to another company. Paying attention to how people are working, not just what they're producing, is going to keep our best people in the Bay Area instead of losing them to burnout.
