I Didn’t Want a Job That Disappears When I Stop
A few weeks ago I put a house on the market and priced it like it was still 2021. Not on purpose. I know what year it is. But I walked in with a confidence that belonged to a market that doesn’t exist anymore, and I expected offers by the weekend. We got 51 groups through in under two weeks. Fifty one. Careful shoes on the hardwood, families in the kitchen, a steady stream of showings that told me everything about the price and the location and the photos. And then nothing. Not one offer.
Fifty one groups means people want the house. It doesn’t mean anyone’s ready to move fast on it anymore. Buyers have made their peace with interest rates, but that peace came with conditions attached. Nobody’s waiving anything. Nobody’s competing hard enough to push past their comfort zone. They’re waiting for something that feels unambiguously right, and if it doesn’t feel that way yet, they’ll sit with it for another month. So I had the conversation I’ve been having a lot lately with my seller, the one I’ve gotten better at but still don’t love. The market shifted. The strategy has to shift with it.
That same week, a TikTok I’d posted about building a hundred thousand dollars a year in ten to fifteen hours a week took off. Comments, shares, people asking real questions. And it cracked open something I’d been sitting on for a while without saying out loud.
I love transactions. I love knowing which side of Highway 9 gets more sun and why it matters, the seller who just needs someone to tell them the truth, the buyer who’s been driving up the mountain every weekend because they can feel themselves getting closer to something they can’t name yet. None of that wears on me. What wears on me is a different question entirely: what happens to any of this if I stop.
If a business only exists as long as I keep grinding it, I haven’t actually built something. I’ve built a job. And a job is fine. A job paid for our house and these kids and this whole life I’m grateful for every single day. But a job doesn’t keep going once my daughter Willow starts school and I want to be the one standing at drop off. A job doesn’t hand back the hours I spent in the car on Highway 9 when what I actually wanted was to be on the porch with my coffee, watching the fog burn off.
This is a lot of why I joined eXp and plugged into Powerhouse in the first place. There’s a structure built into that model, agent attraction, revenue share, where the time you spend helping other agents find their footing builds something that doesn’t evaporate the day you’re too tired to grind anymore. I’ll be honest, I didn’t fully understand it when I signed on. I understood it well enough to recognize it as an exit strategy, which is what I was quietly looking for the whole time, even before I had language for it.
The TikTok hit a nerve because it named something a lot of agents feel and don’t usually say out loud. They want to do good work in fewer hours. They want whatever they build to outlast the point where they still have the energy for the grind. That’s the conversation I actually want to be having, and I still haven’t figured out how to have it without pulling focus from the transactions that pay this month’s bills, which, let’s be honest, still matter enormously.
I don’t think you can build two things at once and expect both to get everything you’ve got. Splitting your attention is how you end up with two half finished things instead of one good one. But I also know the grind has a shelf life, and waiting for the perfect, calm moment to plan for what comes after it is how a lot of agents wake up ten years in with nothing but their own two hands to show for it.
I don’t have this fully figured out. Some weeks I still feel the pull to just chase the next closing and let the bigger question sit. But I keep coming back to that 51-group listing with zero offers, and the TikTok about ten to fifteen hours a week, and I think they were actually the same lesson wearing two different outfits. Attracting attention and even attracting activity isn’t the same as building something durable. You have to build for the version of your life that’s coming, not just the one you’re standing in today.
If you’re an agent who’s ever looked at your calendar and wondered what happens to your income the week you can’t show up, or if you’re sitting with the same question I was sitting with in that ballroom this spring, I’d love to talk about what a model built for that actually looks like. No pitch. Just a real conversation, whenever you have twenty minutes.