Why I run Team ROVI inside REAL instead of as my own brokerage

I've been in this business over 20 years. Eight of them as part-owner of five Century 21 offices. Then I founded ROVI Homes in 2015 and ran it as broker/owner until December 2024 — built it from scratch, grew it to 250+ agents across MA, CT, RI, NH, FL, made the INC 5000 list twice. In December 2024, I merged ROVI Homes with REAL Broker and rebuilt the team inside their platform. 175 agents came with me.

I get asked all the time why I gave up the broker license. Why I stopped owning the asset. Why I'd run a team inside someone else's brokerage instead of staying independent.

The honest answer is: I ran the math, and the math doesn't favor independent brokerages anymore. Not for the agents. Not for the team leader. Not for me.

Here's what most people don't realize about owning a brokerage.

When you're a broker-owner, you're not really running a real estate business. You're running three businesses at once. You're running a real estate business — the part that makes money. You're running a compliance business — the part that takes most of your week. And you're running a software-procurement business, because every brokerage has to assemble its own tech stack from a dozen different vendors and renegotiate every contract every year.

The compliance and software businesses don't compound. They're a treadmill. You hire an admin, you hire a designated broker per state, you hire a transaction supervisor, you sign up for Dotloop and Follow Up Boss and ShowingTime and a dozen other tools, and every one of those decisions is a one-way door. Then a state regulator updates their forms, a vendor doubles their pricing, or someone leaves and takes institutional knowledge with them, and you're back at the drawing board.

Now multiply that by five states. That's where I was at the end of 2024. That's not a real estate business. That's an infrastructure business with a real estate business stapled to the side.

The platform argument

The structural argument for running a team inside REAL is that REAL is better at the infrastructure business than I'll ever be. They run the same platform — exactly the same — across all 50 states and four countries. When they fix a transaction workflow, every agent on the platform gets the fix the next morning. When they negotiate a vendor contract, every agent gets the price. When they ship a new tool, it's standardized, it's tested, and it doesn't ask for my time.

That's the platform model. It only works at scale. I had 250 agents at peak. REAL has tens of thousands. They can afford engineers and compliance teams and product managers I couldn't justify hiring. And because they're publicly traded, the better the platform gets, the more the stock is worth — which is paid out to agents. Their incentive is aligned with mine.

Compare that to a franchise model. I say this without taking a shot at any specific brand, because some of those brands do good work. Franchises are structurally limited. Each office is independently owned and operated. That's not a marketing line; that's a legal fact. When a franchise releases a new tech tool, it lands in hundreds of offices that each decide whether to use it. When a franchise updates training, it lands in a network where every market center has its own training calendar and its own GM. Improvements at one office don't propagate. The brand is shared. The infrastructure isn't.

Independent brokerages — what I was running — are even worse off. You don't have the franchise's central R&D budget. You don't have the platform's engineering team. You're a small business owner cosplaying as a tech company.

What it costs your agents

The other piece of math is what owning the brokerage costs your agents.

When I was broker-owner of ROVI Homes, every dollar I spent on infrastructure had to come out of either my pocket or my agents' splits. There's no way around that. Brokerage is a margin business. The bigger the office, the more leverage on overhead. The more leverage on overhead, the better the splits you can offer. That's why most independent brokerages settle into 70/30 or 60/40 splits at the top — those are the splits that make the lights stay on.

REAL's economics are 85/15 from deal one, with a $12K cap. After the cap, agents keep 100% of their commission for the rest of the year. There's no monthly desk fee. There's no "pay to play." On top of that, agents earn revenue share when they help recruit, and stock awards when they cap or recruit a capper. That's three compensation mechanisms layered together.

I couldn't have built that as a broker-owner. The economics don't work. If I'd offered an 85/15 cap on $12K and stock and revenue share, I would have lost money on every deal. So I would have had to charge it back somewhere — desk fees, transaction fees, marketing fees, "broker review" fees. Which is what almost every traditional brokerage does. Which is why almost every traditional brokerage's economics look the way they do.

The work that doesn't scale

The uncomfortable truth I had to admit at the end of 2024 is that the best thing I could do for my agents wasn't to keep being their broker. It was to stop being their broker, and to use the energy that had been going into infrastructure to do something only I can do.

That's the third piece — and it's the one most people miss.

When you stop running the infrastructure business, you free up the time to run the parts of a real estate business that don't scale. Mentorship doesn't scale through software. Coaching doesn't scale through Slack. Opening doors for new agents doesn't scale through a CRM. Those things require a person showing up. They require a team leader who's not also debugging an e-signature integration at 9pm.

What Team ROVI does inside REAL is the work I couldn't do when I was running the brokerage too. We run training every Tuesday and Thursday. Lauren coaches new agents through their first transactions full-time. Justin Mandese is our designated broker across three states and is on the phone with agents the same day they call. LJ runs onboarding so new agents are set up in a week instead of three. We feed Zillow Flex leads into the team after the ISA team vets them, so new agents start with real conversations week one. None of that work could have happened if I were also signing every state's compliance docs every Monday.

The pitch isn't "REAL is great." Plenty of agents at REAL are struggling because the platform model only handles the infrastructure side. The human side is on the agent. Getting your first deals, learning the market, building a book. Or on a team. That's the gap Team ROVI fills.

I don't regret 18 years as a broker-owner. I learned the business at every level by running it. But I wouldn't go back. The structural argument is too strong: platform beats franchise, franchise beats independent, and a team inside the right platform is the best deal in the industry for new and growing agents.

If you're a broker-owner reading this and wondering whether to hold the line — I get it. I held it longer than I should have. But the math doesn't get better next year. Run it.