Here's a question I couldn't stop asking: why is the biggest financial decision most people ever make run entirely on an agent's say-so — “market knowledge” and “negotiation strategy” that never appear on paper and can never be checked?
I'll concede the obvious objection up front. Plenty of agents do have real market knowledge and real negotiating skill. But you have no way of knowing which ones before you sign, and the traditional model doesn't even pretend to help you find out. The advice lives in the agent's head, the fee is set by the price of the house rather than the quality of the work, 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 — a separate education platform I run — offers 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 started rebuilding how The Tartan Team works — first the fees, then, more importantly, the work itself — 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 how we work is designed around one principle: representation you can verify. Because analysis you can check — not charisma, not hustle, not a billboard — is what produces the best outcomes for the people we serve, and what keeps our incentives pointed the same direction as yours.
In practice, that means the claims most agents make on trust are, here, put in writing where you can check them. The Market Analysis comes with days-on-market predictions, delivered in writing before you list — so you can hold us to them. Sellers get a Weekly Report every week their home is on the market. Buyers get an Offer Strategy Report before the offer goes in. And before you sign anything, you get a written Engagement Proposal — your exact scope, your exact fee, and one sentence explaining why it's the fee — with a fire-us-anytime clause, because alignment you can't leave isn't alignment.
I should be honest about the detour. We spent two years running a published flat-fee menu to attack the industry's opacity from the fee side, and we retired it in 2026. It taught us something better: the fee was never the real problem. The unverifiable claims were. So now we put the work in plain sight, and the fee in writing before commitment — here's exactly how that works.
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 full representation at all — nothing in our compensation model punishes us for saying so.
That's the idea, and the rest of this site is where you can test it — how we work, the market data we publish every week, and the stories of how it plays out in real transactions.
If you've read this far, you already know whether this is the kind of representation you want. If it is, we'd like to talk.
