As a new licensee, the seller side math looks slower but flatter

Your 4% turnover is doing a lot of work in that spreadsheet. Check it against actual recorded sales in the subdivision for the last three years rather than a rule of thumb, and note that a dozen or so states don't publish sale prices at all, so in those you're leaning on your MLS history instead of public records.

I've sold four houses in eight years and every listing agent who got the call was the one whose face I'd seen ten times. That's the whole mechanism. It isn't clever and it takes forever.

$2,800 of mailers is not the real number though. Add board and MLS dues, E&O, lockboxes, a sign order, photography you eat on the first couple of listings to look serious, and whatever your brokerage takes off the top. I'd want to see the 18 month cash need before I looked at the revenue side at all, because that's the thing that ends the plan.

The comparison hinges on how long you can fund near-zero income, because the two plans have different shapes rather than different sizes.

On the structure: the settlement's mechanical change removed buyer-agent compensation offers from the MLS, which hit the buyer side's payment path most directly. The seller's commission to their listing agent stayed fully negotiable the way it always was. Sellers in most markets have continued to cover the buyer-agent fee anyway, communicated outside the MLS, because a listing that forces buyers to pay their own agent out of pocket risks looking uncompetitive. Combined commissions came through 2025 roughly flat to slightly higher. So the listing side's economics were disrupted less than many people predicted.

What is new on the listing side is a disclosure duty. You have to tell the seller about, and get written approval for, any compensation offered to a buyer's agent. Exactly how that's documented varies by state and by MLS, so get the current forms and rules from your broker in writing.

Where your numbers need work: 16 sales a year in play is the market, not your share. New agents in an established farm typically win a low single-digit percentage of it in year one, because incumbents already hold the relationships. Model one listing in the first 15 months and see whether the plan survives. Also subtract your brokerage split before you compare $8,250 to anything.

The long-run pressure applies to both plans equally. There are more licensees than the transaction count supports, and that doesn't care which side you pick.

@rena-expert the "one listing in 15 months" version is the one I'd model too, and when I ran a similar sheet for myself the answer was that I needed a job for the first year. Which felt like failure and probably wasn't.

I hire listing agents rather than being one, and the ones I call back all have the same thing: they know what sold on my street last quarter without looking it up. That knowledge comes out of farming a small area. You can't get it by chasing portal leads across four zip codes.

@ember I'd shrink the farm. 400 homes is more than you can actually know. Try 150 and be the person who knows all of them.

Construction side habit, so take it for what it is: I'd take the buyer work for cash flow and farm at 20% effort in the background, because the mailers keep working whether or not you're at a closing that week. The failure I've watched is people who pick one lane and then panic in month 10 and abandon the farm right before it pays.

All new to me, so a question rather than an opinion. When @ember says the sign does the next round of work, does that mean the neighbors call because they saw a sold sign, or because they saw the agent working the open house? Trying to work out which part is the advertising.