REAL Broker fees for a solo agent: the complete breakdown

When an agent asks me what REAL costs, they usually mean the split. They've heard "85/15" and they want to know if that's the whole story. It isn't, and I'd be doing you a disservice if I let you believe it was. Every brokerage has a fee schedule underneath the headline number, and the only honest way to compare REAL to where you are now is to put the entire schedule on the table — the cap, the recurring fees, the per-deal fees, and the line items you'll stop paying the day you leave your current shop.

I'm writing this for a solo agent with their own pipeline going REAL direct. No team, no lead flow, no team layer changing the numbers. Just you, your business, and the question of what it actually costs to run it through REAL.

The annual fee and the one-time join fee

Two fixed REAL fees, and it's worth being precise about which is which. There's a one-time $249 join fee, paid once when you onboard — not every year. And there's a $750 annual brokerage fee, which REAL takes as $250 out of each of your first three closings of your anniversary year, so if you don't close, you don't pay it. Neither is a monthly desk fee — there is no monthly desk fee at REAL. Compared to a brokerage charging you two or three hundred dollars a month whether or not you close anything, a one-time $249 plus a $750-a-year fee tied to actual closings is a different category of cost. I'll come back to the monthly-fee comparison, because for a lot of agents that's where the real money is hiding.

The split, until the cap

You keep 85% of your gross commission. REAL keeps 15%. That continues until you've paid REAL a total of $12,000 in commission splits in your anniversary year — your cap — and after that you're at 100% of your commission, minus the small per-transaction fees I'll get to.

The cap is the number that decides your year, not the split. I wrote a full worked example of the cap-and-split math against a typical traditional split — deal by deal, then across a year, fees included — and if you want to see the arithmetic rather than read about it, start there. The short version: a capped model means your cost is bounded. Once you've paid the $12,000, REAL's percentage stops participating in your deals entirely.

The per-transaction fees

This is the part the headline leaves out, and it's where most "REAL is free" claims fall apart. There are real per-deal fees, and I'd rather you hear the honest list from me than find them on a settlement statement.

• A $40 CBR fee on each deal — broker review of the file, your errors-and-omissions coverage, and transaction processing. It's flat, not a percentage, so it doesn't scale with your commission.
• A $285 post-cap transaction fee on every sale after you've hit the $12,000 cap, which drops to $129 once you reach Elite Agent status. Once REAL's percentage stops, this flat per-deal fee continues in its place. This is the trade you're making at the cap: instead of giving up 15% of a big commission, you give up a few hundred dollars flat. On a large deal that's an enormous difference in your favor.

None of these are hidden if you ask, but plenty of agents don't ask, and then the first post-cap statement surprises them. Put these in your own spreadsheet. They don't change the direction of the math for a producer with steady volume, but they're real dollars and an honest breakdown includes them.

What you stop paying

Here's the side of the ledger the fee schedule never shows you, and for a lot of agents it's the bigger number. When you go REAL direct, several costs you've treated as the price of doing business simply disappear.

No monthly desk fee. If you're paying $300 a month at your current brokerage, that's $3,600 a year you hand over before you've sold anything. At REAL that line is zero. For a moderate producer, the absence of a monthly fee can outweigh every per-transaction fee on the list above.

No franchise royalty. Franchise brands take a royalty off the top of your commission to pay for the brand on the sign. REAL has no franchise layer, so there's no royalty riding on every deal.

No office lease baked into your split. You're not paying, through your split, for a storefront you visit twice a month. I spent twenty years carrying that overhead as a broker/owner, and when I finally did the arithmetic on what it was actually buying my agents, the answer was not much. That's a big part of why I moved my whole organization to REAL, and the part of that decision that applies cleanly to a solo agent is exactly this: the overhead you stop paying for.

So what does it actually cost

Add it up for a typical year: a one-time $249 join fee in year one only, the $750 annual fee (taken from your first three closings), your $12,000 cap if you produce enough to hit it, a $40 CBR fee per deal, and the post-cap transaction fees on the deals after you cap. That's the REAL side. (For the complete current fee schedule alongside every way REAL pays you back, see the 8 ways you earn income at REAL.) Against it, set everything you currently pay — your split give-up across every deal with no cap, your monthly desk fees, any franchise royalty, any technology or marketing fees your brokerage bundles in. The comparison almost always comes down to one structural fact: REAL caps and most traditional models don't.

If you do very few deals a year and never hit the cap, you're simply paying 15% plus the small fees on everything, which is still usually better than a desk-fee brokerage but is a narrower win. If you produce real volume, the capped structure pulls away from an uncapped split every single deal past the line.

The honest move is to run it on your own numbers — your deal count, your average commission, your current split and fees. The calculator does the arithmetic if you'd rather not build the spreadsheet yourself, and it puts REAL's full fee schedule next to whatever you're paying today.

If you want me to run it against your actual current brokerage terms rather than a clean example — your real cap, your real monthly fees, your real post-cap math — book an intro and I'll do it with you. If the honest answer is that staying put is the better math for your volume, I'll tell you that.