You're not wrong.
That commission is a lot of money.
It took you months to earn it.
Maybe years.
Only you know which.
And somewhere between the first conversation with an agent and the moment you saw the number in writing, you had a thought you probably haven't said out loud to anyone.
How hard could this actually be?
Twenty years ago a man in Vienna VA sat with that same thought.
He was selling his house.
He stared at the commission number.
And he did something most people don't.
He pulled the thread.
He read every book he could find. He interviewed agents. He asked the questions nobody asks — what do you actually do that justifies this number?
He hired an agent anyway. He didn't have the legal knowledge, the marketing reach, or the paperwork experience to go it alone. But he walked away from that transaction with something nobody gave him.
The truth about how it actually works.
Homes don't sell because of magic.
They sell because of location, condition, and realistic pricing.
His agent provided options.
Not miracles.
And he walked away thinking: this system charges too much.
He couldn't let it go.
Before real estate, he had spent years as the chef for the Motion Picture Association of America. He understood what real value looked like. What it felt like when someone was overcharging you. He had built his career on a simple conviction — deliver what you promise, charge what's fair.
When he looked at the real estate industry, he saw a business built on the opposite of that.
So in 2007 he built an alternative.
His name is Jim.
And he has been proving it works ever since.
Here is what Jim found when he pulled that thread.
Stanford University studied 680 home sales over 26 years.
Their conclusion was precise and devastating.
Brokers do not produce higher selling prices.
The commission on those sales averaged $34,000.
The researchers called it a steep price to pay for the value rendered.
The Consumer Federation of America studied 17,805 home sales across 35 cities.
In city after city they found the same commission rate repeated in transaction after transaction — with a uniformity that does not exist in any honest competitive marketplace.
Their conclusion: this is not a free market.
Then in 2024 the federal government agreed loudly enough to extract $418 million from the National Association of Realtors.
The settlement produced one sentence the industry had spent decades avoiding.
Broker commissions are not set by law and are fully negotiable.
They always were.
You just weren't told.
If this has always been true, and why is nothing changing?
Because the system that overcharges you is the same system that controls where you look for help. And it has spent decades making sure you never looked anywhere else.
When most people start thinking about selling their home they Google it.
They ask friends.
They find Zillow. Realtor.com. HomeLight. UpNest. Maybe they remember Dave Ramsey saying to find an Endorsed Local Provider.
These feel like independent recommendations.
They are not.
Zillow charges agents thousands of dollars monthly for leads.
HomeLight and UpNest take 25 to 40 percent referral fees from the agents they recommend.
Dave Ramsey's Endorsed Local Providers pay to be in that program.
Every platform you trusted to help you find the best agent was financially rewarded for sending you to the most expensive one.
Not the best one.
The most expensive one.
This isn't a conspiracy.
It's a business model.
And it works beautifully.
For them.
Jim has a different way of thinking about it.
If you're going in the wrong direction there are no enemies trying to stop you. But if you're threatening the system they come for you.
For 19 years they've come for him.
He's still here.
So what do I actually do?
That is the right question. And it has a precise answer.
Jim calls it the Four Positions.
Not because it's complicated.
Because selling a home well requires four things to be precisely right simultaneously. And most agents only think about one of them.
The First Position: The Home
Not decorated. Not staged for vanity. Positioned.
That means a pre-listing inspection before a buyer ever walks through the door. You find the problems first. You decide what to fix, what to price in, and what to disclose,
on your timeline, with competitive bids, without deadline pressure.
It means pricing from hard market data. Not hope. Not what your neighbor got two years ago. Not what you need to buy the next place.
What the market will actually bear today.
Accurate pricing protects two things most sellers never
think about simultaneously, your sale price and your days on market.
Because a home that sits starts to smell like a problem.
Even when it isn't one.
The Second Position: The Compensation
This is where most of the money lives.
You will almost certainly receive a request from a buyer's agent to cover their fee.
Pay it.
Not blindly. Not automatically at whatever number they name.
But pay it, strategically, deliberately, as part of a negotiation you control.
Here is why.
The buyer sitting in that agent's car has already spent months searching. They've already fallen in love with your home on Zillow at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night. They've already driven past it twice.
The buyer's agent didn't find your home for them.
Your home found the buyer.
But won't agents skip my house if I offer less?
In 19 years Jim has never once had a buyer's agent refuse to show a listing because the commission was lower than they wanted. Not once. Because the buyer had already found the home. On Zillow. At eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night. The agent's job was to open the door.
That agent has made a promise to their client, that the seller will cover their fee. Honor that promise. Work with it. Because what you want is not to win an argument about commission.
What you want is a buyer.
The new rules mean you can negotiate that fee. Ask for three percent. Counter toward two. On a $600,000 home that single negotiation puts $6,000 back in your pocket before anyone touches anything else.
Position the compensation. Don't surrender it.
The Third Position: The Buyer
This is the one nobody talks about and everybody should.
The buyer who wants your home is not your adversary.
They are cash-strapped. They've scraped together a down payment. They have closing costs. They have the list of things they want to do to the house the moment it's theirs.
They are not sitting on a pile of extra money waiting to spend it.
When you understand that, really understand it, you stop seeing the transaction as a negotiation between opponents.
You start seeing it as a puzzle.
How do we structure this so the buyer can actually get to the closing table?
The seller who makes it easy for the right buyer to buy their home doesn't lose money.
They close.
The Fourth Position: The Buyer's Agent
They are not your enemy either.
They have a client who wants your home. They have a contract with that client. They have a professional obligation to get them across the finish line.
Work with them.
Communicate clearly. Respond quickly. Negotiate firmly but fairly.
Because the buyer's agent who feels respected and heard becomes your ally in the final stretch when financing gets complicated, when the inspection produces surprises, when the appraisal comes in at a number nobody expected.
Four positions.
The home. The compensation. The buyer. The buyer's agent.
All four precisely set. All four working together.
That is not a discount service.
That is a strategy.
And at the end of it when the wire hits your account here is what the math looks like on a $600,000 home in Niceville, Shalimar, or Fort Walton Beach.
Traditional model: $36,000 in total commission. Gone.
Uber Realty: 1% listing fee plus a negotiated 2% buyer's agent commission. Total: $18,000.
The difference: $18,000 that stays in your account.
Not because you got less.
Because you finally understood what you were actually paying for.
Jim is not going to tell you what to do.
He is going to show you the numbers.
All of them.
Before you sign anything.
Before you commit to anything.
Before you owe him a single thing.
He will put your home on one side of a plain English net sheet and what you keep on the other.
At 6 percent.
At his fee.
With a negotiated buyer's agent commission.
Without one.
Every scenario. Every dollar. In plain English. On a piece of paper you can take home and sit with.
Because Jim was you once.
He sat at a kitchen table staring at a number that felt wrong.
He pulled the thread.
He spent 19 years proving what he found.
He is not trying to talk you out of hiring someone else.
He is trying to make sure that whatever you decide, you decide it with your eyes open.
With the real numbers in front of you.
With the full picture that the industry spent decades making sure you never had.
That is it.
That is the whole thing.
Five hundred families.
Two million dollars that stayed where it belonged.
in the hands of the people who earned it.
Month by month. Year by year.
The same way you did.
My name is Jim.
Pleased to meet you.
850-499-2940
Call or text. I answer.