Marek Zmysłowski Blog

Notes from the other side of the table — a developer’s view on what the industry is actually measuring.

Two things have been on my mind lately.

The first is a small rebellion I’ve noticed online. Quiet, unglamorous brokers — the ones who close eight or nine deals a year and know every one of their clients’ kids’ names — have started pushing back on the lifestyle crowd. You know the type. Filming themselves walking through a $4M house, gold watch, drone shot of the pool, “DM me to see this one.” Half the time it isn’t even their listing.

The second is the ad copy. #1 in the region. Top 1% producer. $180M closed. 340 families served.

I don’t think these two things are separate. I think they’re the same problem wearing two different outfits.

And I want to say something that sounds ungenerous but that I believe is mostly true: when a broker’s main pitch is how much he sells, that usually signals his marketing budget, not how well he’ll treat you.

I’m a developer, not a broker. I have no ax to grind with anyone’s Instagram. But I sit on the other side of this table often enough to have opinions about how it’s built.

Start with the arithmetic

The median REALTOR closed nine transaction sides in 2025, on median individual sales volume of $2.7 million. That’s from NAR’s own 2026 Member Profile, based on a membership of roughly 1.44 million. Agents with six or more years of experience did about ten sides.

Nine deals a year. That’s the middle of the profession.

Now consider what a “Top 1% Producer” badge actually requires. Sixty, eighty, a hundred sides. Five to eight closings every month, every month, forever.

There is no version of that where one human being is present for all of it. Not because top producers are lazy or dishonest — most of the ones I’ve met are the opposite, they’re the hardest workers in the room. It’s arithmetic. A house purchase is the largest financial decision most people ever make, and it takes calls at 9pm, a site visit you didn’t schedule, an hour on the phone with someone’s anxious father. Multiply that by eighty.

So volume gets solved the only way it can: leverage. Inside sales agents to qualify. Showing assistants to open doors. Transaction coordinators to push paper. Junior agents to absorb the ones who aren’t buying this quarter.

A Colorado broker wrote a post earlier this year explaining why he deliberately does not want top-producer status, and he described exactly this: the name on the billboard becomes a brand rather than a person, and clients who came to him from mega-teams kept telling him variations of the same story — they’d hired someone whose voice they never actually heard, and their questions were being fielded by a rotating cast of people who each knew one chapter of their file. Meanwhile the person they thought they’d hired was at a conference, or filming content, or in a listing appointment for the next batch.

That’s not a scandal. That’s the operating model. Volume requires leverage and leverage requires handoffs. It’s just that nobody puts “you will be served by our fourth-most-experienced team member” on the billboard.

The part that isn’t just cringe

Back to the guys posing in houses they don’t represent.

Most people treat this as a taste problem. It isn’t only that. Under NAR’s Code of Ethics, Article 12 requires a REALTOR to present a “true picture” in advertising and marketing — and Standard of Practice 12-7 restricts claiming to have sold a property to those who actually participated as listing or cooperating broker. Separately, the model MLS rule (Section 2.7) says a listing shall not be advertised by anyone other than the listing broker without that broker’s prior consent.

NAR published guidance on this specifically for social media: no, you may not post another firm’s new listings to your Facebook or Instagram without permission from the listing firm. IDX blanket permissions generally don’t cover you there either.

So the walk-through video with no attribution isn’t merely tacky. It’s borrowing someone else’s inventory to build your own personal brand, in a way the industry’s own rulebook says you shouldn’t. The boring brokers making fun of it aren’t being snobs. They’re noticing that the rules are being enforced approximately never.

Why the market rewards this

Here’s the uncomfortable structural bit, and it’s the reason I don’t think this is fixable with better manners.

Buyers and sellers do not comparison-shop. In NAR’s 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 81% of sellers contacted only one agent before choosing who would sell their home. Around three-quarters of repeat buyers interviewed only one. Forty-three percent of buyers found their agent through a referral from a friend, neighbor, or relative.

Think about what that means. The client isn’t running a bake-off. They’re hiring the first credible name that surfaces when the thought “I should probably move” enters their head.

Which means the winning strategy is not be the best broker. The winning strategy is be the name that surfaces. Those are different games, and they reward different behavior. One rewards two hours on the phone with an indecisive seller. The other rewards being in the feed on Tuesday morning.

The market is not selecting for service quality. It’s selecting for recall.

And the feedback loop is broken

You’d think satisfaction data would correct this. It doesn’t, because the data is nearly meaningless.

Roughly 88–91% of buyers say they’d use their agent again or recommend them. Sounds like an industry doing a fantastic job. But the share who actually come back is a small fraction of that—the commonly cited estimates put real repeat usage in the low-to-mid teens. One industry figure that has always stuck with me: around 70% of homeowners can’t recall their agent’s name a year after closing.

So the survey score measures politeness at the closing table. It doesn’t measure whether the client got well served — because the client mostly can’t tell. They only did this once. They have no counterfactual. They don’t know what the house could have sold for, or what the inspection should have flagged, or whether the offer they accepted on day four was the best one that was coming.

In an industry where the customer cannot evaluate the product, reputation stops tracking quality and starts tracking visibility. That’s not cynicism. That’s just what happens to any market with that shape.

The incentive underneath all of it

Levitt and Syverson published the definitive study on this back in 2008 in the Review of Economics and Statistics. They compared 98,000 Chicago-area home sales, isolating the roughly 3,300 where the seller was themselves a real estate agent.

The result: agent-owned homes sold for about 3.7% more and sat on the market about 9.5 days longer than comparable homes the same agents were selling for clients.

The logic is simple and it’s not about villainy. On an extra $10,000 of sale price, a broker’s marginal share is a couple hundred dollars. Their marginal cost of two more weeks of showings, calls, and negotiation is enormous. So when they’re spending your money, closing fast is rational. When they’re spending their own, patience suddenly pays.

Now scale that up. The broker juggling seventy deals has far less time per file than the one juggling nine. Which means the “just close it” incentive is strongest exactly where the volume badge is biggest.

I want to be careful here: this doesn’t make high producers bad people. It makes the compensation structure a bad instrument. And volume is the multiplier on that bad instrument, not a defense against it.

The triangle nobody talks about

Here’s where I have to be honest about my own side.

In a typical new-development sale there are three parties in the room. The developer wants absorption — units sold, capital recycled, next phase funded. The broker wants closings — that’s how he’s paid. And the buyer wants… to make a good decision, which sometimes means not buying, or not yet, or not this unit.

Two of those three parties are compensated for velocity. One isn’t. And that third one is the only person in the room with real money at risk who is also the least informed.

Nobody in that structure is paid to say “hold off six months” or “honestly, the other project fits you better.” So it very rarely gets said.

At Samana Group we run sales in-house, and I’d be lying if I claimed that solves the problem. It doesn’t. It swaps one conflict for another — we’re selling our own product, which is about as conflicted as it gets, and anyone evaluating us should say so out loud.

What it does do is remove the hiding place. No third party can be blamed for an overpromise. The person who described the roadworks timeline to a buyer still lives here, still runs into that buyer at the beach two years later, and still has to explain themselves. That’s not virtue. It’s just accountability that can’t be outsourced, and I’ve come to think it’s more useful than any incentive-alignment clause I could write into a brokerage agreement.

Better questions than “how much did you sell?”

If you’re hiring someone to represent you — on either side — the volume number tells you almost nothing. Try these instead:

1. How many clients are you actively working with right now? Not last year’s total. Right now. The answer tells you what share of their week you can realistically expect.
2. Who will actually answer when I call at 8pm? Get the name. Then meet that person before you sign.
3. Tell me about a deal you talked a client out of. If they can’t produce one, they’ve never once put the client’s interest above their own pipeline. Or they have, and they don’t think it’s worth mentioning — which tells you what they think you want to hear.
4. Which of these listings is yours? For the content-heavy ones. It’s a fair question and the answer is instructive.
5. What’s your average time from first contact to closing? Fast isn’t automatically good. Ask why it’s fast.

I’m not arguing that every high-volume broker is bad or every quiet one is good. Some people are genuinely brilliant operators who have built real machines with real standards, and some low-volume agents are low-volume because they’re not good at this.

I’m arguing something narrower: volume measures lead flow, not care. We’ve collectively agreed to treat it as a proxy for quality because it’s the only number that’s easy to publish. And the whole industry — developers included — has quietly built its marketing on top of a metric that measures the wrong thing.

The brokers rolling their eyes at the drone footage aren’t being bitter. I think they’re just the first ones to say out loud that the scoreboard is measuring the wrong game.

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Sources: NAR 2026 Member Profile; NAR 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers; NAR Code of Ethics Article 12 and Standard of Practice 12-7; NAR model MLS rule Section 2.7; Levitt & Syverson, “Market Distortions When Agents Are Better Informed,” Review of Economics and Statistics 90(4), 2008.