Here's a question I couldn't stop asking: why should the agent helping you buy an $800,000 home earn twice as much as the agent helping you buy a $400,000 one — for what is often the same work?
I'll concede the obvious objection up front. More expensive homes can mean more complexity — tougher negotiations, pickier inspections, more at stake. Sometimes. But the correlation between price and effort is loose at best, and the traditional commission model doesn't even pretend to track it. The price of the house sets the price of the service, and for decades nobody in my industry was supposed to look too closely at that arrangement.
In 2024, the courts looked closely. The Sitzer-Burnett verdict and the NAR settlement that followed forced the first real structural change to agent compensation in generations. And here's what shocked me — not the lawsuit itself, but my industry's response to it. Almost overnight, the consensus among agents and industry leaders became: nothing to see here. Nothing has really changed, they told consumers, except a bit of extra paperwork. Loopholes appeared within weeks. The machinery adjusted, absorbed the blow, and carried on.
I thought the settlement should have been a wake-up call — an opportunity to actually reckon with what consumers had been saying for years. That buyer-agent compensation lacked transparency. That it rewarded the wrong things. That a buyer's agent earning more because their client spent more is a misalignment hiding in plain sight: the person advising you on the largest purchase of your life has a financial incentive pointed in the opposite direction of your own.
Most of the industry doubled down on the status quo. I decided to lean in.
How I got here
I didn't come to real estate through a brokerage's recruiting funnel. I came to it as a consumer first. In 2017, my wife Hillary and I bought our second home in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and converted the basement into an Airbnb. We built equity in a home we loved while the rental income offset a meaningful share of our mortgage. From there, we partnered with friends on fix-and-flip projects, and I fell for this industry completely — housing sits at the intersection of our deepest human needs and the single most powerful wealth-building vehicle available to most American families. That combination still moves me.
When we moved back to my hometown of Vancouver, Washington in 2021, I joined New Tradition Homes, an award-winning local builder, as an on-site sales agent. In my first year I was among their top-selling agents, helping nearly forty families build and close on new homes — and getting a hands-on education in how houses actually get built, which still informs how I evaluate them today.
In 2023, I left the builder to start The Tartan Team. The founding idea was simple: serious agency without the ego that so often comes with "top producer" culture. Less theater, more substance.
Then the settlement arrived, and the idea got sharper.
The education of a skeptic
In the settlement's aftermath, I had a theory: between rising AI capability and a worsening affordability picture, more buyers were going to attempt to represent themselves — and almost nothing in the industry was built to support them. So I built something. The DIY Homebuyer Academy is an education platform where I offer video guidance and one-on-one consulting to homebuyers nationwide, including buyers who want to forgo hiring an agent entirely.
Coaching those buyers taught me more about my industry than selling homes ever did. I watched dozens of self-represented buyers run into walls the system had quietly built to keep them out. I watched buyers sign agency agreements on a doorstep — under pressure, in the rain, just trying to get inside for a showing — and realize only later that they'd committed to a 2.5% or 3% commission with a stranger. I said as much, on the record, to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal when their housing reporters covered why the settlement hadn't actually cut costs for consumers.
Through all of it, Dave Miller — now my business partner — was my sounding board. From 2024 on, he and I kept circling the same problem from different angles: the incentive structure itself was the defect. Not bad agents. Not even high fees, exactly. Misaligned fees.
So in late 2025, I rebuilt The Tartan Team's compensation model from the ground up, to bring my own brokerage into alignment with everything I'd been writing and teaching. And in early 2026, I started Realtor Gone Rogue, where I write about real estate's incentive problems for an audience that now includes a fair number of the industry leaders I'm critiquing. (They take it better than you'd expect. Usually.)
What we believe
Everything in our model is designed around one principle: aligned incentives. Because alignment — not charisma, not hustle, not a billboard — is what produces the best outcomes for the people we serve.
In practice, that means our pricing is built to decouple what we earn from decisions that should be yours alone. Flat fees for buyers, so our advice on what you offer isn't shaded by what we'd make. A tiered structure for sellers that stops scaling the way traditional commissions do. Hourly consulting for people who want expert judgment without full representation — because some clients genuinely don't need everything, and they shouldn't pay as if they do. The specifics live on our pricing page, every fee in plain sight.
But let me be blunt about what this is and isn't. We are not competing on being cheaper than other agents. Discount brokerages have existed for decades; most of them cut the price by cutting the service. We're competing on something harder: better judgment, delivered by people whose financial incentives don't quietly argue against you. When we tell you to walk away from a house, or to offer less, or that you don't need our full-service tier — nothing in our compensation model punishes us for saying so.
The model isn't just more affordable. It's better. That's the claim, and the rest of this site exists to back it up — the pricing, the calculators, the market data, the stories of how it plays out in real transactions.
If you're the kind of person who reads a page like this all the way to the end, you're probably our kind of client.