When the Austin, Texas, market turned in late 2022, the 2021 playbook stopped penciling. It took us a minute to catch up on the shift, however. We were paying for every lead source, adding every tool, saying yes to every pilot. That approach works when volume is carrying you. But then, the volume evaporated, and the excess became visible.
The instinct for many brokers in that position is to respond by adding: more activity, more outreach, more systems to signal momentum. We went the other direction. We started cutting. Most of what went we didn’t miss.
The Shift That Started the Audit
Boom times have a way of letting waste accumulate. When leads are closing at a breakneck pace and spend is paying for itself, keeping track of cost-per-acquisition takes a back seat—partially because nobody needs to watch it so closely. The problem is that the habits that lead to excess don’t recalibrate on their own when volume drops.
The shift started for us when we stopped asking “how many agents” and started asking “how much per agent.” Median production was flat while headcount had grown. We were running harder to stay in the same place. Once we reframed the question, the audit followed. We pulled closed deal data against every lead source, tool and program in our operation and asked three things about each:
- “Is it producing closed deals?”
- “Is someone actively managing it?”
- “Would cutting it leave a real gap, or just a feeling of one?”
The AdWords Cut
By 2022, we were spending $50,000 a month on Google Ads. When the market turned, we audited the account line by line and cut spend in half. Lead volume didn’t move.
A 50% cut with no volume loss means the other 50% was never working. We just couldn’t see it while things were good and we were focused on closing deals. A down market removes that cover and forces the question of what the spend was actually producing. In our case, the answer was humbling.
The Farm Cut
We had been mailing to roughly 60,000 homes across Austin at around $30,000 a month. During the boom, the returns were consistent enough that the spend felt like infrastructure.
When the market shifted, the economics split by ZIP code. Some neighborhoods stayed profitable. Others flipped negative fast, particularly areas with heavy builder competition where new construction was undercutting resale. We cut the farm in half, kept the ZIP codes with favorable resale dynamics and dropped the ones where the numbers no longer made sense. We saved roughly $15,000 a month with almost no effect on revenue. The farm got sharper rather than smaller.
The SaaS Rethink
Overlapping software is one of the quieter drains on both budget and agent attention, and a down market is a good time for getting honest about that.
Over the last year, we replaced roughly $2,500 a month in off-the-shelf subscriptions with internal tools built using agentic coding—Claude Code, specifically. We’re not a technology company, yet we’re capable of doing this. AI is making it possible. The old question was, “What should we buy?” It’s now, “Should we build this first?” That calculus has shifted more than most brokers have caught up to yet.
The Weekend Emails
Leadership behavior is part of the operating stack too. During the boom, I sent team emails whenever something occurred to me, including weekends. It felt productive. It wasn’t. Instead, it trained the team to feel permanently on-call and quietly eroded a culture we’d spent years building. When I stopped, the business didn’t slow down. The team got sharper. Some of what feels like leadership is just noise you’ve gotten used to making.
What the Cuts Produced
Agent retention at our brokerage is running at 90% against an Austin metro average closer to 65%. Eighty-seven percent of our revenue is agent owned, coming from agents working their own relationships rather than company-generated lead flow. The simplification didn’t hollow out the business. It concentrated on what compounds. That’s the real outcome of cutting the bloat: You can finally see what’s working.
One caveat is worth naming. When we pushed our Google Ads cost-per-acquisition target too aggressively in 2024, lead volume dropped roughly 50% with minimal efficiency gain. The first round of cuts was eliminating waste, but the next was cutting into muscle. There’s a meaningful difference between the two, and it’s easy to miss in the middle of an audit mindset. Simplify until things get clear. Stop before you turn the machine off.
Three Questions Worth Asking
The point isn’t to replicate our specific cuts. Every market is different. The point is the audit itself: mapping what you’re running against what it’s actually producing, without the cover that volume provides.
Three questions worth asking about everything in your operation are:
- “What's producing closed deals?”
- “What's consuming time without converting?”
- “What would you not build today if you were starting from scratch?”
The last one is worth sitting with. If you wouldn’t build it today, you’re probably only keeping it because stopping feels like admitting failure. In our experience, what it actually admits is that you’re paying attention.
