Picture a listing agent standing in the living room during a showing. The buyer is clearly interested. The agent turns and says, “Just so you know, this one’s been sitting 87 days and they’ve dropped the price twice. I’d come in low.”

That’s a betrayal. That agent would lose their license and deserve to.

Now pull up any home search portal. Days on market. Price cut history, timestamped and published. We didn’t just allow that betrayal. We automated it and called it transparency.

Sam Walton built the largest company on earth on one belief, drilled into every employee: “There is only one boss. The customer.” That customer, Walton said, can fire everybody from the chairman down just by spending his money somewhere else. So ask the question almost nobody in real estate ever asks. Who is our boss? Who writes the check? The seller.

When a home sells, the seller pays the commission. All of it. And that money quietly fans out and funds this entire industry. The brokerages. The agents. The MLSs, associations, conferences, coaches, and yes, the portals. Trace any dollar in this business back far enough and you land at the same closing table, same person, same check. Without sellers, none of it exists.

Even the billion-dollar Sitzer verdict and settlement didn’t change it.

Its philosophy was that buyers should pay for their own representation, so MLSs were barred from publishing offers of buyer agent compensation. But nothing changed. Buyer agents tell their buyers not to worry, the fee gets written into the offer, and if a seller won’t cover it, maybe this isn’t the right house. At closing, the seller pays. Same as always.

Some argue buyers really pay it, since they bring the purchase money. That’s a red herring. Buyers don’t care what a seller spends to get a deal done. They care about what they pay and what they get. The commission is paid by the name printed next to it on the closing statement. In almost every sale in America, that name is the seller’s.

If sellers pay for everything we do, why does so much of what we do fail to serve them?

We built brokerage models that compete for agents instead of sellers. Walk into many firms and ask what’s on the leadership agenda. It’s headcount. It’s splits. It’s retention. Not once in my 50-year career have I seen a major firm focus on, build, and then widely market a superior home selling process to help its paying customer, the seller. And yet if attracting and retaining agents is the goal, generating listing business for agents is the one attraction plan that never stops working. Agents will go where the business is. Agents will stay where the business is.

I’ve suggested offering a better home selling model to many real estate firms with the resources to do it. They resist. Not because it wouldn’t work. They know it would attract business. But champion a better way to the public, and the public expects it from every agent in the firm. And a handful of top producers who don’t need the business prefer their own way. So, to keep a few agents happy, firms withhold a superior product from millions of sellers yearning for an alternative. That harms the many agents who need the business. Think about this: We may be the only business in America that markets harder to the people who work in it than to the people who pay for it.

And look at what we accept as “the way it is” and let happen to our one paying customer. The MLSs and home search portals, our primary marketing channels, display days on market and every price adjustment. One major portal even publishes offer guides nudging buyers to bid below the seller’s price. All of it diminishes sale prices. We allow it anyway.

We let those same portals use our sellers’ homes as bait.

The seller’s biggest financial asset goes online, attracts a buyer, and that buyer gets routed to an agent who has never seen the home, doesn’t represent the seller, and paid for the lead. The portal earns a referral fee. The listing agent gets left in the cold. The seller gets harmed. The buyer gets a stranger. And we call this exposure.

And don’t be misled by our industry’s polarizing private listing debate. It misses the point entirely. Nobody is advocating hiding listings. Agents and their sellers simply want the freedom to choose marketing channels that don’t detract from a home’s value or divert buyers to pay-for-lead agents. There are many other effective media beyond the home search portals to reach buyers and their agents.

The bottom line?

When everything, and I mean everything, in a home’s marketing is designed to help buyers see more value, and nothing detracts from it, homes sell faster and for more money. And if agents were trained, really trained, in the strategies premium brands use to market, position and negotiate, sellers would pocket even more. But they’re not. Our training teaches agents how to convince sellers to list, not how to sell homes for more. It’s a paradox. Show a seller a process proven to sell their home for more, and they’ll sign in a second.

Don’t interpret this to mean buyer representation doesn’t matter. Helping a buyer find the right home and protecting them to closing is honorable, skilled work that should be a true specialty buyers value and pay for. But this is about priority. An industry funded by sellers should be obsessed with serving sellers better.

Sellers fund everything we do, so serving them better should be the centerpiece of everything we do.

This is not meant to tear our business down. It’s asking our business to look up. Because the day we put our paying customer first is the day everyone in this business, agents included, wins.

Billions in outside capital has been circling our industry. Google is testing the waters right now. We are vulnerable. Somebody is going to figure it out and build everything around a single promise to sellers: we will get you a higher price, faster, than anyone else. And they’ll prove it. Then they’ll have the sellers, which means the inventory. Whoever has the inventory has the buyers. And whoever has both won’t need to recruit agents. The agents will flock to them.

An industry funded by sellers is up for grabs to the first company that decides to put them first. Somebody is going to build that company. The only question is whether it comes from outside our industry or from within it.

Either way, the risk is real. And the clock is ticking.

Greg Hague is the founder of 72SMART, a free agent-training platform built around a home selling program he developed that compresses buyer demand into a competitive 72-hour launch weekend. Through 72SOLD, he markets that program nationwide on TV and refers sellers to the local agents who’ve learned it. He was recently appointed Director of Home Sales Strategy for Compass International Holdings, where he helps 100,000+ Century 21 agents grow their market share and better serve America’s home sellers.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners.

To contact the editor responsible for this piece: tracey@hwmedia.com