Dollars Is Seventh on Our Own List. It’s the Only One They Ask About.
Every leader in real estate knows how the recruiting conversation starts. An agent sits down, glances at the numbers, and asks the question you can set your watch by:
“What’s your split?”
And if we aren’t careful, we answer it. We negotiate caps. We shave desk fees. We find two more points somewhere. In doing that, we quietly agree with the agent’s assumption — that the only lever available to them is a cheaper version of what they already have.
Henry Ford supposedly said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The line survives because it gets something right about how people ask for things.
But here’s the part worth sitting with: the agent isn’t being naive. Dollars is the only D anyone publishes. Every brokerage in the market advertises its split. Nobody advertises their transaction-support response time, or how many deals their broker saved at the closing table last quarter. So the agent optimizes the one number they can actually see.
That’s not their failure. That’s ours.
Run the Math Out Loud
Take an agent doing $1.5 million in volume — three or four deals a year at 2.5%. Roughly $37,500 in gross commission income.
Move them from an 80/20 to an 85/15. Five full points. The kind of concession you’d have to fight your P&L to make.
It’s worth about $1,875 a year to them.
Now sell one additional $500,000 home. At 80/20, that single transaction is worth roughly $10,000.
One deal beats five points. Say that out loud, on a whiteboard, in front of the agent. Once they see the number, you are no longer defending your split — you are asking the better question: what is standing between you and that one extra deal?
The Eight D’s
We’ve been writing about the Eight D’s here for two years — 104 straight weeks. They came out of the agent migration data, not a brainstorm, and they hold up because agents don’t move for one reason. They move for one reason they can articulate, sitting on top of six or seven they can’t.
Direction — Leadership vision and brokerage strategy. Do they know where this company is going, and do they want to go there?
De-Risking — Support systems that reduce personal and financial risk. One rescued deal pays for a lifetime of split difference.
Development — Training, mentorship, and growth opportunities. Not generic webinars. One gap, ninety days, measured.
Differentiation — Clear brand or model advantages. Something that answers the client’s real question: why should I hire you?
Dynamics — Internal culture and team cohesion. The one thing a competitor can’t copy by Friday.
Digital/Data — Tools and platforms that actually raise productivity, plus live local market intelligence they can use in a listing appointment tomorrow.
Dollars — Competitive compensation and commission structure. Real, and worth being honest about. Also the only D on this list that can’t create a transaction that didn’t already exist.
Dissatisfaction — The push factor. Nobody moves because a deck was impressive. They move because something has been grinding on them long enough that change feels safer than staying.
Look at where Dollars sits. Seventh of eight. That ordering wasn’t an accident, and it isn’t marketing — it’s what the migration data shows. Meanwhile it’s the first thing out of the agent’s mouth in nine meetings out of ten.
Your job in that first meeting isn’t to present the other seven. It’s to find out which one the Dissatisfaction is actually attached to — because it is almost never Dollars, even when Dollars is the word they use.
The Questions That Replace “What’s Your Split?”
You don’t get there by presenting. You get there by diagnosing:
- How many appointments did you set last month — and how many did you actually run?
- Walk me through what happens between “I got the lead” and “I’m at their kitchen table.”
- Where in the last year did a deal nearly fall apart, and who did you call?
- What part of your week do you dread?
- If I gave you back six hours, what would you do with them?
Every answer points at a D. None of them point at Dollars.
When the Split Is the Problem
The honest part, because leaving it out makes everything above sound like a broker defending an uncompetitive model.
Sometimes the agent’s math is simply correct. A 100-transaction producer paying $60,000 over cap for services they don’t use is not asking for a faster horse. They are reading a spreadsheet accurately. If you can’t say what the other seven D’s are worth to that agent in dollars — not in adjectives — they should leave, and you should let them.
So this isn’t a rebuttal you deploy when the split question comes up. It’s a standard you hold yourself to: if you can’t price your value, you don’t have any. Do that work, and the split conversation stops being a threat.
The next time an agent asks you for a faster horse, don’t quote them a rate. Find out where they’re actually stuck, and show them how to build the engine that gets them there.
That is how you win the day.
When an agent sits down across from you, which of the Eight D’s is actually driving the move — and which one do they say out loud?
