Before I joined eXp, I had one specific fear, and it had nothing to do with commission splits or technology. I was afraid of sitting alone in my own kitchen, staring at a laptop, wondering if anyone else on earth was doing this job.
I'd spent my early years inside a team. It wasn't perfect, but there was a physical place. People walked past my desk. Someone was always around to ask whether a clause in an addendum looked right. When I started thinking about leaving for a brokerage that mostly lives online, I kept coming back to the same worry. I told myself I'd miss people too much.
My first Powerhouse call was from my kitchen table with a cold cup of coffee. I turned my camera off for the first ten minutes because I didn't know the etiquette. By minute eleven I had turned it on, because someone said something so specific to my situation that I forgot to be shy. She was a mom just like me who wanted to build a business with her kids at the center of it, just like me!
That was a small thing. It's also the thing I think about when agents ask me whether the online part feels cold.
Here's what I've learned. A physical office gives you proximity, and proximity feels like community, but they aren't the same animal. I could sit next to someone for a year and never learn how they price a listing or what they do when a buyer goes quiet. On the calls I'm on now, people say those things out loud, because the whole structure is built around agents sharing what they know. Nobody is guarding a lead list or a script. I didn't expect that to matter as much as it does.
I won't pretend it's all easy. You do have to show up. Nobody walks past your desk, so if you never join a call, never post a question, and never answer someone else's, you will in fact be alone in your kitchen. The community is there, but it works like a gym membership. It only helps if you go. Some weeks I'm better at this than others. There are weeks when I have two showings, and a sick kid, and the calls are the first thing to slide. I’m not perfect. No one is.
If I'm honest about what changed, it's that I stopped treating loneliness as something the company would solve for me. Instead I treated it as something I could do something about, with a lot of help. That's a better position to be in than waiting for an office to hand you friends.
The agents I talk to who are thinking about a move usually ask about money first, and that's reasonable. But the question I'd gently suggest asking is a different one. Where, in your current setup, do you actually go when you're stuck? Who answers when you text at 9pm? If the answer is a name you can say right away, great, keep that. If you have to think about it, that's worth knowing before you decide anything.
If you're in that second group and you're curious what a week inside Powerhouse actually looks like, I'm happy to talk it through. No pitch, no deck. Grab a coffee with me (or a call, if you're nowhere near the Santa Cruz Mountains) and ask whatever you'd ask a friend who'd already done it.