Leaving to save a 30 percent split often means spending most of it on running your own brokerage

Take an agent on a 70/30 split doing about $120k of gross commission a year, handing over roughly $36k annually. That figure alone makes opening a one-person shop look like an easy win, until the actual cost of the year gets totaled. MLS participation and association dues as a firm rather than an agent run about $2,600. An E&O policy in the broker's own name runs $3,100. Entity setup and the accountant handling returns run $2,400. Bookkeeping and a compliance filing service run $3,600. Business insurance and workers comp, once an assistant is added, run $2,900. Signage, website, and phone add another $2,200. That is around $17k before any time goes toward selling. The cost that is easy to miss is the transaction coordinator a solo broker no longer has. A previous brokerage reviewing every file and catching errors is gone, replaced by the broker personally chasing every signature, disclosure, and deadline, with real risk of deals nearly falling out for lack of a backstop. Supervision and trust account rules vary significantly by state, with specific requirements around record retention and signing authority, so that structure needs confirmation from someone licensed in the relevant state rather than assumed from another state's practice. On the arithmetic alone, $36k saved against $17k spent nets out close to a wash once the lost selling time is counted. The move tends to make sense mainly with a plan to add agents, since a solo brokerage otherwise ends up as a more expensive version of being an agent.