Glossary · Customer Acquisition Cost
What is CAC (cost per sale) for a developer?
CAC (customer acquisition cost) is what one sale costs a developer. The simple version is the ad budget divided by the number of sales for the period. The full version adds sales team salaries and commissions, broker commissions, the showroom and the CRM on top of advertising. You compare CAC against the average sale price and the project's margin.
An example with a developer's numbers
A project spends MX$300,000 on ads and closes 5 sales: marketing CAC is MX$60,000. With an average price of MX$3.5M, that's about 1.7% of the unit's price.
If first contact reaches 60% of leads instead of 30%, sales rise to about 10 and CAC drops to MX$30,000. Budget and CPL stayed the same. What changed was how the team worked the lead after the inquiry.
What counts as a sale when you calculate CAC
We count a sale only as a signed contract with the down payment (enganche) paid. A reservation (apartado) doesn't count as a sale: reservations get canceled more often, and CAC based on them comes out too low. Subtract canceled contracts from the sales count for the same period.
Common mistakes
- Broker sales go into CAC without the broker commission. The channel looks cheaper than it really is.
- The month's budget gets divided by that same month's sales. A developer's path from lead to closed deal takes weeks or months, so it's more honest to calculate by lead cohort or by quarter.
- CAC gets compared across projects with different price points. CAC as a percentage of the average price makes the comparison easier.