What institutional discipline reveals when it meets a market that has never been subjected to it
Every few years, a new wave of real estate technology companies arrives with a familiar promise: we are going to fix the home buying and selling experience. Better search. Smarter listings. Faster closings. Smoother interfaces. And every few years, the fundamental economics of the transaction remain largely untouched.
That is not a coincidence. It is a diagnosis.
Regan McGee spent years structuring and executing institutional real estate deals before founding Nobul in 2017. What he saw, looking across the consumer market from a capital markets vantage point, was not primarily a technology problem. It was a capital allocation problem: billions of dollars moving inefficiently through transactions designed, structurally, to favor intermediaries over the people actually writing the checks.
“It’s all about the customer,” McGee says. “The person that shows up with the money, that’s the customer.”
The Lens Nobody Brought
In institutional real estate, capital allocation decisions are made with detailed underwriting, rigorous fee analysis, and clear accountability for outcomes. Intermediaries are evaluated on performance, not proximity or habit. The idea that fees of 5 to 6 percent would be accepted without competitive pressure, or that anyone would select a service provider without meaningful data on their track record, would not survive contact with that discipline.
McGee spent years in that world before turning his attention to the consumer side. What he found there was the same market, functionally, operating by entirely different rules. The same asset class. The same transaction. A completely different standard for how capital was being treated.
That gap was not incidental. It was the business.
What the Numbers Reveal
The average total real estate commission in the U.S. currently sits at approximately 5.7% of a home’s sale price, split between the listing agent and buyer’s agent. On a median-priced home, that translates to roughly $20,000 in fees for a service where, in most cases, the consumer has limited visibility into what they are getting for that price, limited ability to compare providers on track record, and limited leverage to negotiate.
Those are not the conditions of a functioning market. They are the conditions of a market where information asymmetry has been allowed to compound for decades, producing outcomes that primarily benefit the intermediaries rather than the people the transaction is supposed to serve.
The 2024 NAR settlement was supposed to change this. The $418 million agreement introduced new transparency requirements, decoupled buyer and seller agent compensation on MLS listings, and was widely expected to drive fees down. Instead, commissions rebounded. After briefly dipping to around 5.32% in 2024, total fees climbed back to 5.57% by 2025, the highest level since 2021. Buyer’s agent commissions, predicted by many to fall sharply, actually ticked upward for homes under $1 million.
The technology solutions that existed by the mid-2010s addressed parts of the problem. Better search tools. Smoother logistics. But the underlying fee structure, the opacity around provider quality, and the absence of real competitive pressure on pricing remained intact. The NAR settlement reached for transparency through regulation and found the same wall. Convenience had improved. The economics had not.
McGee’s observation was precise: this was the predictable outcome of structural opacity, the same forces that drive inefficiency in any market where the buyer knows far less than the seller. And it was solvable — not with a better interface or a regulatory mandate, but with a different market structure entirely.
Inverting the Dynamic
Nobul, founded in 2017, was built on that premise. Rather than layering technology onto the existing transaction model, it replaced the model. The platform created a real-time marketplace where real estate service providers — agents, mortgage brokers, and insurance brokers — compete openly for consumer business. Providers undercut each other on fees. Consumers evaluate them against transparent track records. The information advantage, historically held entirely by the intermediary, shifts to the person writing the check.
“You get the best possible price,” McGee explains. “You also see their track record. So you get the best of the best, at the best prices.”
The company grew quickly, operating in more than 30 U.S. states and most of North America, with thousands of service providers on the platform. Its four-year compound annual growth rate reached 79,000%, earning recognition on the Deloitte Fast 50 and Fast 500 and the CNBC Upstart 100. That growth was not driven by a superior interface. It was driven by a value proposition that put competitive pressure exactly where the market had, for a long time, allowed none to exist.
Transparency as a Structural Advantage
Markets that resist transparency tend to be markets where incumbents are extracting value rather than creating it. That pattern holds across industries, and consumer real estate was no exception. What Nobul introduced was not a new technology so much as a new condition: the requirement that providers compete on both quality and price, in plain view of the person they are competing to serve.
Most PropTech founders have approached the space as a user experience problem. McGee approached it as a capital allocation problem, which meant asking a different question entirely — not how to make the existing transaction smoother, but whether the transaction itself was properly designed. Those are not the same question, and they do not produce the same answers.
“If you provide service with that mindset,” he says, “you’re destined to succeed.”
The more instructive observation is that the mindset itself — rigorous, customer-first, intolerant of opacity — was not developed in consumer real estate. It was developed in the institutional market, where those standards were simply expected. McGee did not invent a new way of thinking about transactions. He applied an existing one to a market that had never been subjected to it. The NAR settlement’s failure to move the needle on fees suggests the problem is not yet solved. It also suggests that structural solutions, rather than regulatory ones, are where the real leverage lies.
