Why we built Team Leaderboard

Almost every real estate team we have looked at runs its year out of a spreadsheet. One file, one owner, a tab per quarter, and a column of formulas that nobody else dares touch. It works, in the sense that the numbers come out. But it fails in every other way that matters.

The person who maintains it is the only one who really understands it. Everyone else finds out where they stand when that person gets around to sending an update — which, in a busy quarter, is not often. Agents guess at their own pace. A team lead cannot answer "who is behind on their goal?" without opening the file and reading down a column. And every deal has to be typed in twice: once in the brokerage's system, once in the sheet.

We started by taking one brokerage's actual tracker apart. Not a mock-up, not a survey — the real file, with real deals in it, and all the awkward things a real file has: leases mixed in with sales, deals split four ways, an override for a mentor, a referral going out, HST on top. Anything the app could not reproduce exactly, we treated as the app being wrong.

What it does

Goals with a live pace. Set an annual GCI goal, split it across quarters, and see where you are against it today rather than at the end of the quarter. Past goals stay on record, so you can see what you set last year and what you actually did.

A leaderboard people will actually look at. A podium, ranked by GCI, net, volume, deal count or percentage of goal, with a Written versus Closed toggle so a strong quarter shows up before the deals close. Badges for the obvious milestones.

Deals, including leases. Most tools in this space treat a lease as an afterthought or leave it out. Leases are recorded properly here — monthly rent, with commission expressed in months of rent — because for a lot of teams they are a real share of the year.

A commission waterfall that matches your sheet. Company split, up to four agents on a deal, overrides, referrals in and out, HST. The number at the bottom should be the number on your commission statement. That was the bar.

Reports. Quarter against quarter, year against year: volume, gross commission, company commission, and the mix of buyer, seller and lease deals.

Import, with the numbers checked. You can bring your spreadsheet over. The import reconciles every row against the totals in your own file and tells you where it disagrees, so you are not trusting it blindly — and if the result is wrong, you can undo the whole thing and try again.

Privacy inside the team. Members see their own commission in full and never see anyone else's, or anyone else's client names. Admins decide who appears on the leaderboard at all — shown, hidden or excluded.

What it is not

It is not your brokerage's transaction management system, and it does not try to be. It does not do conveyancing, document storage or compliance. It does one job: track what the team is aiming at, what it has actually written and closed, and what everyone is owed.

It is also not finished. We are a small independent team in Toronto, and this is the first version that we think is honest to hand to someone else.

What's next

The iPhone app has been submitted to the App Store and should be available shortly. After that, the list we are working from is short and comes mostly from watching people use it: better handling of team-level goals, more of the reports available on the phone, and a smoother path from "I have a spreadsheet" to "the team is on it" in one sitting.

Team Leaderboard is free while we are in beta. If you run a team and your year still lives in a spreadsheet, we would like you to try it and tell us where it gets your numbers wrong — that feedback is worth more to us right now than anything else.

Say hello: [email protected].