Gathering Storm Clouds

Who Speaks for the Independent Broker When the Giants Finish Eating?

I was literally recording an episode of my podcast with an old RE/MAX friend who’d moved over to Real a few months ago (I’ll add the link to the comments when it’s live).

We were deep in the big-picture conversation: where the profession is headed, who would merge with whom next, what it all means for practitioners in the trenches, very nerdy real estate talk (you’ll love it). Then we finished the recording and my phone started buzzing on the desk.

EXP and NextHome’s merger announcement.

I texted her right then since we’d just spent twenty minutes incorrectly guessing about who the next pairing would be. We lol’ed about it the way you laugh when something is funny and not funny at the same time.

Here’s what that moment threw into sharp relief: the entire real estate space is moving so quickly right now that two industry veterans recording a podcast about consolidation can’t even keep up with it in real time!

That’s where I want to start today. What’s happening right now isn’t noise, it’s a structural realignment on a new foundation that’s being drawn while it’s being poured. And most agents in this country are too heads-down on their next transaction to look up and see it.

Before I lay any of this out, let me remind you that correlation is not causation. Some of what I’m about to walk through is likely unrelated. Companies make their own decisions for their own reasons. Regulators move on their own timelines. Markets do what markets do.

But from 30,000 feet, this is quite a gathering of storm clouds. And when you see weather like this rolling in, you don’t have to know exactly which cloud is going to drop the rain. You just have to decide whether you’re going to keep walking or find shelter.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

Two weeks. Two major consolidations:

• Real + RE/MAX

• EXP + NextHome

Compass + Anywhere already merged into a behemoth of a company a few months ago, which may as well be a lifetime. Rocket and Redfin locked arms a minute ago, too. Keller Williams still standing (and growing) alone, but for how long? The portal wars are playing out in courts right now, with Zillow, Realtor.com, and Homes.com all swinging at each other for ownership of the data and the process as well.

This is not just noise. This is a structural realignment of an entire profession which, at its core, is a patriotic service to the American Dream. Yet too many agents are so transaction-focused, they haven’t looked up to see it (and I get it-this kind of information doesn’t pay the mortgage while it leads you down the rabbit hole).

Now, I’m not anti-consolidation on principle. RE/MAX’s debt load is real, and any company with a global brand as strong as theirs has to make hard calls. I’ve worn their franchise owner hat so of course my eyes go to their moves. I’ve also spoken at conferences with most of the brands you’ve heard of and I’ve admired their leadership, their brokers and their agents. I understand why these deals happen and I’m not interested in pretending the leaders making them are villains. When the first deal happens thanks to piles of venture capital money, of course it causes a ripple effect.

But underneath every merger announcement are the independent contractors who put that brand on their signs, their Facebook pages, their business cards, on little league jerseys in their communities. They are the faces that make the numbers happen. And nobody asked them. The managing brokers and franchise owners? Caught by surprise (and even if they are happy about it-it’s still a surprise and an upheaval of everything they knew).

Maybe the fight isn’t over the data that AI is already scraping. Maybe it’s over mind share.

Ask a consumer where they start a home search, and whether agents like it or not, they’ll say Zillow. Zillow isn’t really a brokerage in practice even though they ‘belong’ to NAR; it’s a data company that sells leads and lobbies in DC. Every consolidated giant wants that same first-thought position, of course.

That’s what the private listing network play is about. Let’s just cut out the third-party MLS (and thus, the portals which rely on the MLS data) and make the consumer come straight to us for the information. (I was going to say ‘just like in the old days, but many of the ones making these decisions were not yet born in those days).

I’m a child of the MLS book era, and have built my business on the best free and fair marketplace in the world… and now I’m watching it get systematically dismantled by people who see real estate as data extraction and moneymoneymoney, not client service and professional excellence.

I know that sounds like a vibe, not an argument. So let me show you the structural pieces that are already in motion—because once you see the architecture, the storm clouds stop looking like a hunch.

The detail that almost nobody outside the real estate hyper-involved caught way back when the NAR class action settlement was unveiled in March 2024: the settlement specifically excluded any company with $2 billion or more in annual revenue.

Read that carefully. The terms ‘protected’ every brokerage under that revenue line from future repercussions tied to the settlement, and left every brokerage above it fully exposed and subject to their own settlement negotiations.

That distinction matters. Plenty of large firms above $2 billion are independent, family-owned operations. Highly successful and respected brands such as Crye-Leike and Howard Hanna are sitting in that exact position right now trying to figure out their own next move (*I have zero inside knowledge, this is me speculating*). The line wasn’t drawn around independence. It was drawn around revenue.

So imagine the predictable next move. If the four or five biggest brokerage groups in the country remember the feeling of finding themselves outside of NAR’s umbrella, and they have the agent count, the transaction volume, and the money to build their own table…what stops them? Nothing except tradition and inertia. They could form their own trade association tomorrow and it would have heft.

THEN, if NAR loses 40-60% of its membership through that exodus (or through a fracture of the three-way agreement) the member dollars vanish while the settlement payments are still coming due. I think NAR is heading toward bankruptcy in some form within the next 18-24 months. Understand, I’m not rooting for it. I’m simply doing the math. IF that happens, what happens to the little guy?

Then, in what may be wildly unrelated but which doesn’t feel that way, North Carolina is moving to eliminate dual agency for individual brokers (*for those of you in other states, you should know that North Carolina is a broker-only state. We no longer have salesman as a status). I have spent years saying I’d love to see dual agency disappear, as the snakes in the grass are real and so many of the complaints received are due to dual agency issues. But the older I get, the more nuance I see. Quick breakdown for any non-real estate people who wandered up in here: dual agency is one agent representing both buyer and seller in an agency capacity, which by general statute assigns fiduciary responsibilities. Designated dual agency would be the buyer and seller both having their own agents but within the same brokerage, where they may or may not have ever interacted but the firm is the umbrella and is on both of the agency agreements since those are with the firm and not the agent. Clear as mud, right?

Eliminating dual agency for single brokers doesn’t necessarily get rid of the bad apples who are cutting corners or failing to disclose in a transaction, though. It does change the game for the honorable solo broker in the rural market where everybody knows everybody. So if you want to sell your house, and Jane is your agent-and Jane’s friend from church called her to buy it-then she can only represent one side which is usually the listing-and the buyer becomes the customer not a client. You hamstring the land broker who’s the only specialist for a hundred miles (dear residential agents, you probably don’t know land-but I digress). You slow down the multifamily broker whose niche depends on serving both sides cleanly. (*and for my friends in states with transaction agency, NC does not have that.*)

Who benefits from this particular change? Any office with multiple agents. Because designated dual agency inside a firm will still be legal, you just have to hand the buyer to another agent down the hall as long as they’re cool with designated dual agency.

This isn’t consumer protection, because no matter how you change the statutes, bad actors will be bad actors. This is regulatory capture dressed up in ethics language. And it’s an assault on that independent broker that almost nobody is naming, the ones who would make a public comment about it BUT are so buried in transactions that when they find out this was ever a discussion, it will have been finalized.

So here’s where I land. Whether you’re a solo broker in a rural North Carolina county, a regional independent serving three states, or a leader inside one of the big firms above the $2 billion line, you’re in this storm. And the conversation about what comes next can’t only happen in the boardrooms of the four or five biggest brands.

I want to hear from you.

If you’re a one-person brokerage in a small town wondering whether you have a future, I want to talk to you.

If you run a mid-size independent and you’re watching the consolidation map and doing the math on your own balance sheet, I want to talk to you.

If you’re inside Crye-Leike or Howard Hanna or any of the big independents above that $2 billion line and you’re asking yourself the same question the newly created giants are asking, I want to talk to you.

This isn’t about building a new bureaucracy. It’s about whether brokers across the size spectrum can find a collaborative voice—perhaps something more like a farmer’s co-op than a trade association?—before someone else decides to speak for us. The DOJ, the lawyer class, the DC ‘thinktanks’ like the Consumer Federation of America (CFA) have had entirely too much say about OUR profession.

Reply to this email. Comment below. Find me on the podcast. Send me a DM. Or go old school and just call me. I don’t have the answers. I have a hunch and a lot of questions, and I’d rather wrestle through them with my fellow brokers of every size than wait for the storm to finish what it started.

If you know a broker who needs to be in this conversation (any brand, any size) forward this to them. This is an ‘us’ problem and I believe in an ‘us’ solution

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