The QWERTY keyboard was engineered to slow typists down so early typewriters wouldn't jam. The jamming problem vanished a century ago; the layout didn't. Buyer-agent commissions are that same kind of inheritance.

Percentage-based pay made sense under the old sub-agent model, when every agent worked for the seller. True buyer agency arrived in the early 1990s — and the compensation model that came with it never got re-examined. Thirty years later, the industry is still kicking the can.

So here's the question I keep coming back to: if we designed buyer-agent compensation from scratch today, what would we actually build? I don't think there's one right answer — but I'm convinced there are a million wrong ones. So instead of prescribing a single model, I lay out the principles any model should meet, then walk through three I think have real legs over the next decade: flat-fee buyer agency, tiered service, and performance-aligned pay.

The QWERTY moment arrives when enough people stop accepting the inheritance. In real estate, we're there. The industry can redesign the model deliberately, with the consumer at the center — or wait for the next lawsuit, the next hearing, the next platform that decides it doesn't need agents at all.

Originally published on Realtor Gone Rogue, March 5, 2026. This is the follow-up to my pieces on why the buyer-agent commission was never defended on merit and the industry's incentives problem.

CHAPTERS

0:00 Intro

0:18 QWERTY: the systems we inherit

0:54 Why percentage commissions are a carryover

1:13 The question the industry has dodged for 30 years

1:58 Principles first — good model vs. broken model

3:24 You don't all need the same answer

3:45 Model 1: Flat-fee buyer agency

5:42 The flat-fee stigma

6:26 Model 2: Tiered service

7:40 The retainer, and choosing your tier

9:28 Pay that reflects the work

9:44 Why buyers lean in

10:45 Model 3: Performance-aligned pay

11:21 Shared-savings, explained

12:17 Why it's hard to build on its own

13:14 Buyer agency was once radical too

13:31 Old guard, new money, same misalignment

14:11 The QWERTY moment for real estate

14:29 Two paths — pick one

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Read the full essay and subscribe to Realtor Gone Rogue → https://realtorgonerogue.substack.com/p/if-we-were-building-this-from-scratch

Follow Nick on LinkedIn → https://linkedin.com/in/nickaufenkamp

Nick is a practicing broker leading The Tartan Team in SW Washington. His work on real estate incentives and reform has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, HousingWire, and Real Estate News.

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