Episode summary
Last episode we explained what the commission lawsuit actually changed. This one is the practical follow-up: what we do differently, and the part that raises the most eyebrows — we charge an upfront retainer to represent buyers.
Dave and I sat down (in person, in the backyard, for the first time) to make the case. The traditional model pays a buyer's agent only when a deal closes, which sounds buyer-friendly until you follow the incentives all the way down. It means some clients get months of work for free while others quietly subsidize them — and the people who get penalized most are an agent's best, easiest clients. It also creates a slow-building pressure: five months into a six-month agreement, an agent who's made nothing yet is powerfully motivated to get you into a house, not necessarily the right house. That pressure is where a lot of the NAR lawsuits came from.
A retainer fixes the alignment. Because we're fairly compensated for our time either way, we can tell you to re-sign your lease and wait, with no hard feelings and no financial axe to grind. We walk through exactly how our model works — full-service buyer agency at a $15,000 flat fee (with a $3,000 retainer credited at closing), limited "virtual" service at $9,000 (with a $1,500 retainer), and non-agency hourly consulting at $450/hour — why a flat fee often saves you money against a percentage, the million-dollar example that turns the fee gap into $10,000 in your pocket, and the first-time-buyer hurdle we're still honestly working through. The real takeaway, though, is simpler: the agent you want is the one who's willing — and able — to negotiate against their own interest.
Hosted by Nick Aufenkamp and Dave Miller of The Tartan Team, brokered by Real Broker, LLC. Serving Clark County and Southwest Washington.
In this episode
- [01:12] Recap: last episode on the NAR settlement and incentive misalignment
- [03:23] The core problem — percentage commissions reward steering
- [05:23] The hidden cost: agents only get paid when a deal closes
- [09:48] How this fed the NAR lawsuits
- [11:53] The Reddit story — a $30k check for ten hours, and why it's only half the picture
- [13:47] Why the best clients end up subsidizing everyone else
- [15:16] The fix: a retainer, borrowed from law and other professions
- [19:24] How the retainer realigns incentives — and frees us to tell you "no"
- [23:17] The three tiers: full service, limited service, and hourly consulting
- [29:27] Why a flat fee can save you money without losing expertise
- [31:52] The first-time-buyer hurdle we're still working through
- [33:45] "That sounds expensive" — the psychology of $15k vs. 2.5%
- [35:33] The million-dollar example: turning the fee gap into $10k for you
- [41:24] The real takeaway: an agent willing to negotiate against their own interest
Links from this episode
- Episode 2 — Real Estate Commissions After the Lawsuit: What Actually Changed — the backstory on the NAR settlement
- thetartanteam.com — buy-side calculators to compare our flat fee against a traditional percentage, and book a free consultation
Transcript
Lightly edited for readability.
Nick (00:00): Hey, welcome back to episode three of Disclosures with Nick and Dave. I'm Nick Aufenkamp, and joining me is my wonderful co-host and partner, Dave Miller.
Dave (00:07): In person, for the first time.
Nick (00:10): That's right. We've got the beautiful outdoor ambiance — and lights, by no small miracle.
Dave (00:20): By no small miracle. The back-end production guys don't get nearly enough credit on all these endeavors — movies, podcasts, and such.
Nick (00:25): After forty-five minutes of monkeying around just to get this set up, I have a whole new level of respect. Right before we started, the box light hit me in the face, so we took it down and said, "You know what, just be backlit instead." Who needs front lighting?
Dave (00:50): And any time you drift back, you go out of focus too. So — perfect.
Nick (00:57): For anybody listening to the podcast, it's all the same.
Dave (01:00): Let it be a testament to the fact that our expertise is real estate, not podcast production.
Nick (01:12): That's a good thing. Speaking of real estate — last week's episode, we got deep into the weeds of the NAR settlement, commissions, and incentive misalignments, calling it as we see it: the ways the industry has been set up to serve agents, often at the expense of consumers. Which, from a business standpoint, makes sense, but —
Dave (01:41): — has rubbed you and me both wrong for several years, and has led us to really re-examine how we want to do business. If you missed that episode, I'd encourage you to check it out for the backstory.
Nick (01:44): Most agents don't talk about compensation and commission structures — "Why do these guys care so much?" I think that comes through in the last episode. But this one, we want to get a lot more practical: what makes The Tartan Team unique? What are we doing? And lest this become a promotional podcast all about us, we'll tie it to some larger things we see happening industry-wide with consumer sentiment — and to some degree even AI. Not that this is an AI podcast...
Dave (02:33): Probably will be, down the line. No doubt. The times, they are a-changing. We're trying to see around the corner and build something for the future, rather than hold onto what's always been done.
Nick (02:39): And the biggest area we've tried to innovate is buyer agency. For those who missed the last episode — we don't want to totally rehash it — but to give some context, and I'm putting you on the spot: what would you say are the biggest issues with the traditional way buyer agency has been done?
Dave (03:23): The most straightforward answer is misalignment between how the buyer's agent gets paid and how that aligns to a buyer's goals in purchasing a house. Boiled down to its most basic: if the buyer's agent is compensated as a percentage of the sale price, they're on some level incentivized to steer their client toward a more expensive house — or a house with easier conditions to close, something more surefire, more likely to put the commission check in their pocket.
Nick (03:52): That's a big piece. If you're hiring somebody to represent you, of course you want them looking out for your best interest — but you're also looking to them to negotiate the best deal possible. And with the traditional percentage model, in order to negotiate the best deal for you, they're also negotiating against themselves. They actually get penalized financially for helping you get the best deal. If you overspend by a hundred grand, that's maybe a $2,500 to $3,000 swing for the buyer's agent. In the grand scheme — is that a ton of money, especially if you want to build a good reputation and live on referrals? No. But the principle still stands: there's a misalignment. One other thing with traditional buyer-agent compensation — agents only get paid when a deal closes. What issues does that create?
Dave (05:23): We'll dive really far into the weeds on this later in the episode, but the main issue is that some people get a bunch of work done by their agent for free, and then other people pay for that. If you work with a buyer's agent and you only pay once you purchase a house, once it closes — a lot of people outside the industry might not realize there are buyer's agents who spend many days, many late nights, many weekends driving their client around, opening doors, showing them houses, and in a lot of cases writing what we'd call lowball offers. Maybe you've got an unrealistic buyer client, with a tight window of what they're looking for and tight finances. You can do all this work, and then if they give up — because it doesn't make sense for them to move, and we'd never want to force anyone to move — but on the flip side, sometimes our agreements are ninety days, sometimes six months. You could spend a lot of time, and then —
Nick (06:51): — if a home doesn't close, you're out. Nothing for the agent. You made zero dollars for all that effort. And in a lot of cases — you could say, "Well, they'll come back to you." I wouldn't venture specific numbers, because I've never seen them, but our general sentiment is: if you've been working with us for six months and we haven't found something and you're frustrated, we're probably also frustrated.
Dave (07:40): Is that person really coming back to you when they find the house they really want on Zillow after your six-month buyer-agency agreement is up? Sometimes, yes. But oftentimes they've had enough of you after six months, and their frustration — whether it's your fault or not — might boil over. It's human nature: something's not going right, and you're looking for someone to blame.
Nick (08:00): And that also comes out in the misalignment of incentives. After three or four months of touring homes — especially if the agent knows the buyer's lease is ending and they have to decide whether to renew or buy — the agent can start to feel, "Shoot, if I don't get them into a home, I'm getting a big fat goose egg. I've been working with this client at a cost, for nothing." So you can start to feel, as a home buyer, this weird pressure: all of a sudden, my agent who was really helpful up front is now pushing me toward a particular home, or wanting me to overlook things we weren't overlooking at the beginning. This is just human nature. Even though they have a fiduciary responsibility to always act in the client's best interest, nobody wants to waste months and months of work. I've talked with many home buyers — not clients of mine, just people around the country sharing their experiences — and it's so common for them to look back and feel, "My buyer's agent started to get frustrated with me, and I felt like they pushed me toward a home that wasn't the ideal fit, because they wanted to get paid."
Dave (09:48): Absolutely. And to retouch on the NAR lawsuit we covered in depth last episode — those types of circumstances, where things don't go the way you want them to, are where a lot of those lawsuits came from. You're five months, two weeks into a six-month contract, and both the buyer and the agent are beyond fed up with each other, and it's, "All right, let's just get something done so this whole thing wasn't a waste." Then a little time goes on, and a lot of buyers feel — rightfully so — upset that the trust they put in their agent was violated. That was a huge part of the reasoning behind those lawsuits against NAR, specifically on the buyer side. Not that there weren't issues on the seller side, but the lawsuit was more focused on buyers.
Nick (11:13): And the biggest consequences came in terms of changes for how buyers operate in the market. It goes back to the idea of buyer agency being "free" to home buyers — which, for the last three or four decades, has been the pitch: work with a buyer's agent because they don't cost you anything, the seller pays. It circumvents the entire conversation about compensation. One interesting thing — if you go on Reddit and look at the complaints about real estate commissions, especially on the buyer-agent side, you'll see stories where a home buyer toured one house — a million-dollar home, a three-percent agreement — and the buyer's agent got a $30,000 paycheck for maybe ten hours of work.
Dave (12:16): Who doesn't want to be making $3,000 an hour? That's good money for anyone. And so there's the public outcry: "That's criminal. The buyer found the house, all the agent did was fill out some pre-made forms and send some emails back and forth, and then they got cut a $30,000 check." On one hand, that's true — it absolutely does happen.
Nick (12:46): It absolutely does happen. But on the other side, you have a lot of the situations we were talking about — six months of showing house after house after house, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty hours of work dumped into a client who never ends up closing. So agents will say, "Look at the whole — on average, we make a very reasonable amount." But the problem with the traditional structure is that the best clients — the one-house, $30,000-check, ten-hour clients — are subsidizing all the work the agent does for free for the clients who don't perform. It's a system where the best clients are penalized and the worst clients get off looking like they got free services. This is one of the big things we've tried to rethink. I've had those clients where, honestly, I've had a hard time sleeping at night, because it was such an easy transaction that, if I'm being really honest, I don't know that I provided as much value as I received. That's not a good feeling — not something either of us can really live with.
Dave (14:17): And of course, there are countless other transactions where it's, "Dude, I provided way, way more value than I received." The juice almost wasn't worth the squeeze — and we can drop the "almost." It was not. So the question became: how do we bring greater parity here? How do we stop penalizing our very best clients —
Nick (14:50): — and make sure we're always compensated for the professional services we render, not tied exclusively to outcomes — to create greater fairness? Not just for us; any professional should be compensated fairly for their work. But also to make it more fair for the clients we serve. So, the setup. What are you pulling at, Nick?
Dave (15:09): Yeah — what are you pulling at, Nick?
Nick (15:16): Well, now that you ask. Thank you. The brilliant idea is retainers.
Dave (15:28): Brilliant — and we can say that, because we're just stealing the idea from other industries. The one that comes to everyone's mind is the legal profession, foremost. It was thought up to solve a similar problem: to protect professionals from spending all their time and getting nothing at the end of all their work if there isn't a big work product — meaning, in this case, an offer written to buy or sell a house. To put it plainly: in our model, the retainer is meant to protect our time for showing houses and any front-end work before we'd write an offer. So in the instances where a client decides, "Nah, this doesn't make sense for me, the timeline didn't work, I had to re-up my lease, the finances didn't make sense and I no longer want to move" — we're not out the ten, twenty, thirty, forty hours of —
Nick (16:53): — discussions, driving around with clients, meeting clients at houses. Even back in 2021, 2022, and 2023, when the market was much more of a frenzy on the buy side — there's more stability now — I knew agents who were writing five, six offers a weekend. You had a couple of clients where you wrote four offers and not a single one got accepted. That's a significant amount of time and work. And whether or not you think all real estate agents are crooks, whether you hate the whole system — I think anyone could agree that if you worked on something for ten, fifteen, twenty hours and didn't get anything for it, that's not a great deal.
Dave (17:53): That's exactly what the retainer is designed to do. It's designed to level things across — to create more of an average income that doesn't favor one buyer who's, honestly, a pain in the butt. And to say it honestly, that is oftentimes the case. There are certain buyer profiles that are really hard to deal with — whether it's the financing, the person with a very narrow idea of what they want to buy, or someone very set on price. We still want to help those clients.
Nick (18:40): We love helping them. But there's a higher risk.
Dave (18:47): Much higher risk to work with a client like that. And we don't want to punish clients on the other end — you just had one a couple of months ago, where somebody came to you and said, "I know the house I want to see, and I already know I'm financially capable of buying it. I just want you to show me the house." You did, you wrote the offer, it got accepted, it was great. Those people shouldn't be punished, because there are people on the other end of the spectrum. So maybe explain a little more about what the retainer looks like across the different levels of service.
Nick (19:24): There's one more thing I want to add first, because the retainer doesn't just protect us and our time. That's an important element — and of course we care about it, that shouldn't surprise anybody — but going back to that incentive alignment, I think it's something our clients really value. Actually, I know it's something they value, because when we give advice, the fact that we have some guaranteed compensation means we're not incentivized the same way a traditional buyer's agent is when they only get paid on commission at closing. Go back to that situation: you've been working with a client for four months, and they have to decide whether to re-sign their lease or move forward on a house. If you get zero compensation as an agent, of course you're massively financially incentivized to push them toward buying. For us, because of the retainer model, we believe we've been fairly compensated for our time — so if the best decision for you is to re-sign the lease and restart your search later, we're able to say that honestly and candidly, with no hard feelings either way. When you're hiring a buyer's agent to be a trusted advisor, you want their financial incentives aligned with your own as much as possible, if you're going to be able to believe any of the advice they give. By taking a retainer up front, it's a way of saying, "We're all bought in here, and we're establishing an advisory relationship." Commission is the language of sales. Especially with buyer agency, it's guidance, counsel, advisory — more than it is an actual sales position. When you're a home buyer, we're not here to sell you a home.
Dave (21:45): We're here to protect your interests throughout the home-buying process. That's a really, really big difference and distinction. And it's worth mentioning that there are still many, many ethical agents who work on percentage commission — we think it's still possible for that to work. But the reason we've shifted to the flat fee with a retainer is that we want the base state of the business model to default to protecting the consumer. We don't want an above-and-beyond level of sacrifice on the agent to be what keeps protection for the consumer top and center.
Nick (22:25): That's why, if you listen to this podcast moving into the future, you're going to hear us keep talking about alignment of incentives. We want the way we're paid — our financial incentive — to be in line with our clients' as much as possible. What I hear you saying is: there are a lot of agents out there with good hearts, but we don't want to be reliant on the good-heartedness of people. We can build a better system than that.
Dave (22:52): Summed up perfectly. And that's exactly what we're trying to do.
Nick (23:17): And the big question — this is the experiment — is: will consumers tolerate the idea that every other buyer's agent in Clark County won't charge a retainer to work with them, but if you work with Nick and Dave, there's a retainer up front? Do the trade-offs of having better alignment of incentives — being able to more wholly trust that we're not financially incentivized to tell you, "Yeah, this is the home for you, you should move forward," because we get nothing if you don't buy a home — make it worth it? This is probably a good place to bring in how the compensation in our model works, since you alluded to the flat fee on the buy side. We have three tiers. Full-service buyer agency is what most people imagine: we set up your search, schedule all your showings, attend them with you, give you real-time feedback, attend your inspections and appraisals, write all the offers, handle the negotiations — all of that. But instead of a percentage, it's a $15,000 flat fee. So if you're buying an $800,000 or $900,000 home, you stand to save several thousand dollars compared to most agents still working on a percentage. With that full service, there's a $3,000 retainer due up front — by and large non-refundable — that recognizes the upfront work Nick and Dave are going to be doing. That $3,000 gets taken out of the final $15,000 at closing, so it's $15,000 total. The next tier is limited service, which is more or less virtual buyer agency.
Dave (25:27): That's a good way to describe it — virtual, in the sense that, to break down some of the mechanics, a huge amount of a real estate agent's time is driving to meetings. That may seem obvious, but we looked at it and thought: if we didn't have to do all this driving around... Let me give an example. Maybe we have a client who's in the trades or in construction, and they know quite a bit about houses, and they don't feel they need our expertise in advising them on, say, the difference between a home built in the '90s versus the 2000s. What are we really doing for them at the in-person meeting? We're flinging a door open, and they're going to feel very confident assessing what they're looking at from the physical standpoint — the actual feel of the house. Where we can really help that buyer is being able to look at the neighborhood and the larger geographical area, and give them discernment on pricing and the more back-end side of what people think a real estate agent does. We wanted there to be an option for people who don't want to pay to have us drive to every appointment and open a door, if they feel confident they know what they're looking at.
Nick (26:58): With the traditional one-size-fits-all model for buyer agents, most of the time is spent opening doors and driving to appointments — on houses you might spend fifteen minutes in before it's, "Well, that's not the one for me," and then another twenty- or thirty-minute drive to the next one. If you look at six or seven homes on a Saturday, that can easily be an eight-hour day. And to your point, for some buyers, having the agent there in person is absolutely valuable. But many buyers feel, "I've bought several homes, I've got construction know-how, I've done remodeling and renovation projects before — I'd be more than happy to tour a home without Nick or Dave with me, going to open houses." We've got a few other creative ways we can get you into the home — kind of like an Uber-esque service for real estate agents. Where Dave and I add the most value in the transaction is in that judgment layer, and usually that comes out in negotiations and making sure you're fully protected legally with the offer, the contract, the back-and-forth. So it's $9,000 for the limited-service model, with a $1,500 retainer. And then we've got a non-agency, DIY tier — if you want to do the whole process yourself but just want somebody with local expertise as a sounding board. We do consulting at $450 an hour, as you need it: you check in with us, we help stress-test your thinking and offer guidance, but there's no agency relationship in that tier.
Nick (29:27): Those are the mechanics. For the full-service and limited-service tiers, we take those retainers at the time of signing a buyer-agency agreement. And sometimes people will start with limited service and then decide, "You know what, I actually do want you there for all the showings," so there's some movement every now and again — because it's still a highly relational business. This isn't an area where you go on our website, choose your level of service, plug in your credit card number, and you've retained us. All of this happens in the context of conversation. But with the retainer, the reason we're able to charge a flat fee rather than a percentage in both full service and limited service — and the reason it can be more financially efficient without losing any judgment or expertise — is that the retainer model means we're always being compensated something for our time. So we're not penalizing our best clients in order to make up for the time we spent with people who never moved forward. For our best clients, they really do realize several thousand dollars in savings without any trade-off in the judgment or expertise they're getting from us — because the retainer model gives us that financial basis and cash flow, so we don't have to squeeze everybody for every dollar of commission we could possibly get.
Dave (31:32): As we've tested this theory and bounced it off experienced home buyers and other people in the industry, one of the issues we're running up against is that a lot of first-time home buyers are looking at the cost of the retainer — specifically buyers who are hoping to finance most of the cost of the home purchase into their loan. What does the option look like for a first-time home buyer to come up with the money to pay our retainer? That's something we're still working out. The thought I'm having is: if the retainer seems like a huge hurdle for you, you can always talk to us. Like Nick said, this isn't "swipe your credit card and that's it." If you're listening and thinking, "I like what these guys are saying, a lot of this makes sense, but $3,000 feels like a lot of money" — and a lot of people, with rates where they're at, are already reaching to afford a home in general — it's worth mentioning: this is how we're hoping the business is set up, and we think there are a lot of good reasons for it, both to protect ourselves and to protect the consumer. But if this feels like a hurdle — "I really wanted to work with you guys, but I just don't think I can front three grand plus the down payment" — give us a call. We're willing to work with people. This episode is meant to give an overview of why we're hoping the industry shifts more toward a model like this, so there's alignment between our goals and our clients' goals.
Nick (33:45): And it's funny — in this industry, you can kind of be penalized for trying to be more transparent about pricing. What I mean is, by us being candid about the $15,000 flat fee for full service with a $3,000 retainer collected up front, one of the reactions I've gotten from a few people is, "That sounds expensive." And that's fair — it's not a cheap professional service, and we don't pretend otherwise. That's worth a conversation about the value being provided. There are a lot of directions we can go — certainly protecting your interests, the negotiations — and we usually do find we're bringing more value to our clients than what we're actually collecting, which, again, we feel really good about. But there's a sleight of hand where, for most traditional agents, two and a half percent sounds a lot less expensive than $15,000. It's psychological, even though two and a half percent on a million-dollar home is $25,000. To make the math really plain — on our website, thetartanteam.com, you can play around with the calculators for full and limited service and see how our fees stack up against a traditional agent. But let's just say you're buying a million-dollar home, because the math is easy, and you're working with us. And let's say the seller is offering a two-and-a-half-percent commission to a buyer's agent —
Dave (35:33): — what we're able to do, because of that $15,000 agreement, is negotiate that $10,000 difference between what we're being compensated and what the seller is offering, to your benefit.
Nick (35:53): Ten thousand dollars off the purchase price, ten thousand in additional closing-cost credits, or making your offer ten thousand dollars more attractive than any other offer on the table — without any additional expense from you. So to this whole idea that "buyer agency is free to the buyer," we're being explicit: no, it's not, and it never has been. But because most sellers are willing to give a credit or compensation to help compensate the buyer's agent, by having a more affordable buyer-agent team, we're able to leverage that to help you see a real return. With most agents, while it might sound cheaper at two and a half percent paid for by the seller, you could actually be paying — or not realizing — a $10,000 difference.
Dave (37:02): And if that feels and sounds convoluted, unfortunately that's kind of by design, with the way this industry has operated for the past few decades. So by trying to turn a light onto it, we're saying, "We actually want to be more transparent about this."
Nick (37:32): And if any of that didn't make sense — we dug into the mechanics of the transaction, and why the industry landed where it did, in the last episode. So that's the high-level summary. But to your point, changing the model is an uphill battle — one, because we're asking buyers to come up with more money.
Dave (38:02): You're correct. We're asking our buyer clients to come up with more money on the front end of the transaction. And we believe the savings we offer by being flat fee — and the potential huge savings that could be realized from having aligned incentives — are in most cases going to be more than the $3,000 retainer. And if we haven't explained any of this well enough and the math sounds convoluted, and you're thinking about buying a house, we'd be happy to explain it over a call. And if you're listening remotely and thinking, "I'm never going to work with these guys," the thing we're hoping people take from this is that you understand the mechanics of the transaction, you understand what the legacy model of real estate agency was, and hopefully, in your circumstance, you can negotiate yourself a better deal. That's something we said last episode: if there's one thing to take out of this, it's that you don't have to just take what you're given — "My uncle used a guy, he was good, and he says he won't do it for any less than two and three-quarter percent."
Nick (39:19): It's a hundred percent negotiable, and not enough agents are clear on that. And we want to negotiate not just a better price — we want the mechanics of it, and the alignment, to be better. That's what the whole Tartan Team model got started on, and that's what we're hoping to push forward. Not primarily for our own gain, but primarily for the consumer's gain — and hopefully to also make the industry better and more even across the board for buyers' agents.
Dave (39:49): Exactly.
Nick (40:19): I think people who see "flat fee" could initially just think, "These guys are discount brokers." And that's been used as a label to malign the cheap operators in the industry who usually underperform when it comes to negotiation or expertise — the corny, cheesy, terrible ones. We're not actually here to fundamentally compete on price. That's an easy game to play, but the old adage that you get what you pay for tends to be true. What we're actually here to compete on is being the most aligned in terms of incentives, and the most trusted as advisors in the home-buying process. And to do that, we have to rethink the compensation model. So it's not that we're just here to merely compete on price. Price is always an important factor — but we're really competing on trust.
Dave (41:24): As I'm thinking back on how we've talked about this, the major part of the retainer that a consumer should take away is the willingness their agent would, or could, have to negotiate against their own interest. There's an agent back in Minneapolis, where I'm from, who's very high-performing — he does a lot of sales, and everybody loves working with him. He was the agent of a very close friend of mine, and I asked my friend, "What do you like about this agent?" He said, "He's the guy who tells you no. He tries to talk you out of buying a house when you're walking it with him. He tries to make sure you see everything that's wrong, instead of just saying, 'Yeah, okay, maybe there's some water in the basement, but look at the granite on the countertop — it's beautiful.'"
Nick (42:08): That might seem a little cartoonish in terms of how blatant it is — any consumer could see through that example, and I say it to illustrate. But the fact of the matter is, the steering is usually a lot more subtle, and unless you're an experienced home buyer, you might not even realize that your agent — who walks through hundreds or thousands of homes a year — is just thinking, "Let's get this one over with."
Dave (42:38): "Let's just close this deal so I can get my commission and move on." And that's what we don't want.
Nick (42:52): Exactly. Super well said. Hopefully that's clear. If there are questions — as Dave made the invitation — we'd love to chat about these things. Certainly if you're looking to buy in Clark County or Southwest Washington, that's where we live, work, and play, and we'd love to serve you. But even if you're out of state, or you're someone in the industry just trying to think through these things — we care about these conversations. And if you're looking to get connected with an agent who shares a similar ethos, we're not the only ones; there are others thinking along the same lines, trying to challenge the status quo. If we can be a conduit to help connect you to some of those like-minded folks in your area, we'd love the privilege to be part of that as well. So thanks for coming along in this week's episode. If you haven't already, make sure you've subscribed to the show — and we'll catch you in the next one.