Finance
What is gross commission income (gci)?
Gross commission income is the total commission an agent or brokerage earns before any splits, fees or expenses are deducted. It is the standard headline measure of production volume.
GCI is a volume measure, not an earnings measure. Two agents with identical GCI can take home very different amounts depending on their brokerage split, desk fees, marketing spend and team costs.
It is nonetheless the common comparison unit in the industry — awards, rankings and recruiting conversations are usually framed in GCI — precisely because it is comparable across agents in a way net income is not.
For planning, GCI works backwards usefully: a target income, divided by expected net share, gives the GCI required, which divided by average commission per deal gives the number of transactions needed.
Related terms
A commission split is how the fee from a transaction is divided — between the brokerages on each side, and then between each brokerage and its individual agent.
A brokerage is the licensed firm under which individual agents operate. It carries legal responsibility for their transactions and provides the supervision, compliance and infrastructure they work within.
Conversion rate is the proportion of leads that progress to a defined outcome — a viewing, an offer, or a completed transaction — and is the main measure of whether a lead source or process is working.
A pipeline is the set of active opportunities an agent is working, organised by the stage each has reached — from new enquiry through viewing, offer and under contract to closed.