You already built the book. Stop paying a split that pretends you didn’t.
If you generate your own business, every percentage point your brokerage takes past a certain point is rent on a brand you don’t need. I ran the brokerage that charged it. The structural problem with the split model is that it scales the cost with your success while the service stays flat — you produce more, you pay more, and you get nothing more for it. REAL is built the other way around.
The cap is the whole argument
At REAL you split 85/15 with the brokerage until your share of commissions reaches a $12,000 cap. After that, you keep 100% for the rest of your anniversary year. There’s no franchise royalty skimming points off the top, and no monthly desk fee draining you in the slow months.
Run it against a 70/30 split. At $300K GCI, a 30% split is $90,000 to the house. At REAL your contribution stops at $12,000 plus a few thousand in transaction fees. For a producer that gap isn’t a rounding error — it’s a hire, a down payment, a year of college. The more you produce, the wider it gets, because your cost is fixed and theirs is a percentage of you.
After the cap, the fees get smaller, not bigger
Post-cap you pay a per-transaction fee, and that fee steps down: it starts at $285 a closing and drops to $100 once you’ve paid $6,000 in post-cap fees for the year. The structure rewards the high-volume back half of your year instead of punishing it. Add a roughly $50 broker-review charge per transaction, a $900 annual fee, and a one-time $249 sign-up in year one. That’s the full cost — and none of it grows just because you had a good year.
The equity is the part most producers underrate
When I owned a brokerage, an agent could give me 30% of their production for a decade and walk away owning nothing. That always sat wrong with me — the agent built the business and the owner kept the asset.
REAL has six ways to earn stock, including an award for capping and awards tied to production, and you can route part of your commission into shares at a discount if you opt in. None of it is guaranteed, and none of it should be why you move — the cap math should be. But over five years, a producer who would have handed a traditional brokerage hundreds of thousands in split is instead building an ownership position in the company they produce for. That’s a structural difference, not a perk.
What the company carries for you
Part of what a split pays for is a broker standing behind your files. At REAL that doesn’t go away; it moves to the company. Compliance, broker review and errors-and-omissions coverage are carried by REAL on every transaction. The tools come with it: one platform, Leo inside the brokerage app for questions, and Hey Leo, with a human team behind it, for actual work. There are live trainings every day, and every session is recorded. A producer doesn’t need most of that to produce. It’s there the night a deal goes sideways.
REAL direct, or a team at REAL
A producer has two ways in. On a team at REAL your cap drops to $6,000, or $4,000 on a mega team, but you split with the team leader on top of it, because the leader is paying for leads and support you may not need. REAL direct, you carry the full $12,000 cap with nobody’s split layered over it, and the stock paths and revenue share are yours on the same terms. If you generate your own business, direct is usually the better structure. If you need the leads, a team is the honest answer, and the team-leader page explains how those work.
Who this is not for
If you don’t have your own pipeline, this is the wrong page. REAL gives you a brokerage; it does not hand you clients. A producer without lead flow at REAL is a producer without lead flow — the cap doesn’t manufacture deals. If you need a pipeline, you’ll do better on a team that delivers one. And if you need a physical office and the energy of a sales floor, REAL is virtual-native; that’s an honest mismatch, not something I’ll talk you out of noticing.
Real’s own materials, unedited.
These are Real’s decks and Real’s numbers, not mine. I link them exactly as Real publishes them so you can check everything I’ve said on this site against the source. When Real changes a fee, it changes here too, because none of it is copied.
Real’s Attraction Deck, loaded from Figma. Open it on joinreal.com
- Why Real, Real’s one-page overviewCulture, model and platform, as Real lays them out.
- Ways to Earn IncomeReal’s walkthrough of the split, the cap, revenue share and stock.
- Ways to Earn Income, as slidesThe same material as a slide deck you can page through.
- Download the one-pagerReal’s own single-page summary of the model.
- Attraction videosReal’s short explainers, in one collection.
- go.joinreal.comReal on revenue share, stock awards and the cap, in its own words.
- tech.onereal.comThe platform Real agents run their business on.
- Everything above, from RealReal’s Agent Attraction portal, where all of these live.
Don’t take the $300K example — take yours. The calculator runs your real GCI and commission-per-side against REAL and a traditional split, Year 1 and five-year cumulative, with no projection you can’t audit. If the gap is real, book a conversation with the team. It’s a structural discussion about your situation, not a pitch — and if REAL isn’t your fit, you’ll hear that too.