MWGA - Make Words Great Again?
Time to Restore Credibility to Industry Titles
The next move in transparency in real estate is bringing back meaning to the words broker and founder.
When I founded ACME Real Estate in 2011, the industry had clear distinctions. Brokers were brokers. Agents were agents. A founder meant the person who literally founded the business. The law defined the differences between broker and agent. One could imagine the general public would understand the dictionary definition of the word “founder” (a person who establishes an institution or settlement).
Today, those lines have blurred beyond recognition. Team Leads have usurped “founder”, offices have Sales Managers instead of Brokers. Teams advertise themselves without any reference to their brokerage in their marketing. The public has no idea if a team is a brokerage or if a brokerage is a team.
We're witnessing the rise of what we call "shadow brokerages" within established firms. Team leaders operating mini-empires under someone else's license while calling themselves “founders”.
But how can you found something within a company someone else created?
The Real Work of Founding
True founders in real estate start from nothing and create something, building systems from scratch, creating distinctive branding, carrying the full weight of errors and omissions insurance for our entire operation. Founders establish brick-and-mortar locations, perhaps, develop pricing structures that attract agents while maintaining profitability.
Most importantly, founders accept liability that agents never touch.
The uphill battle is relentless, especially without investor capital backing every decision.
The Team Leader Reality
Compare this to team leaders calling themselves founders today.
They walk into existing brokerages with established systems, provided technology, and existing brick-and-mortar infrastructure. Their errors and omissions insurance? Covered by the actual brokerage.
Their innovation requirements? Hiring agents and creating a team brand.
The systems they use largely mirror the existing brokerage model. Period.
For example, Jon Grauman, a luxury Los Angeles agent, started a team under Side, which serves as the broker of record. Yet media coverage in The Real Deal described it as him starting a brokerage.
That's simply not true. He's a top producing agent leading a top producing team, not a founder creating a brokerage.
Companies like Side position themselves as "invisible back ends," allowing teams to market almost like independent brokerages while operating under someone else's license. Keller Williams is another brokerage that supports the “is it a team or is it a brokerage” confusion by encouraging independence in branding. Rarely do I see KW teams identify themselves as KW teams. They prefer, I imagine, the esteem of the consumer thinking they are their own entity, or founders (so to speak).
The Structural Corruption
This title inflation reflects deeper industry problems.
Traditional broker responsibilities have been systematically dismantled. Instead of brokers monitoring agent performance and maintaining ethical standards, we see sales managers incentivized purely by recruitment, retention, and performance metrics.
Many brokerages now operate with one broker for an entire state, relying on sales managers with no visible accountability for agent monitoring or training.
The consumer protection that broker oversight was designed to provide has evaporated.
Consumer Confusion and Legal Risk
This matters because consumers deserve transparency.
When buyers or sellers engage someone calling themselves a founder, they reasonably expect to work with an established, experienced professional who built something significant.
Instead, they might be hiring someone who simply gave themselves an impressive title.
In an industry already facing transparency-related lawsuits, this artificial title elevation creates additional legal exposure. Consumers could legitimately claim they were misled about their agent's actual experience and standing.
We already struggle with standardized professional titles compared to other industries. Adding arbitrary founder designations only deepens the confusion.
The Solution
The Department of Real Estate and the National Association of Realtors needs to establish clear rules.
Only licensed brokers who actually create companies should be permitted to use the founder title.
This returns meaning to professional designations and protects consumers from misleading marketing.
Real estate operates on trust. When titles lose their meaning, that trust erodes.
We've seen this pattern before with paid award placements in real estate magazines and other artificially elevated credentials designed to impress consumers without reflecting actual achievement.
The founder title deserves better.
Restoring Professional Standards
The solution requires industry-wide recognition that words matter.
Founding a company involves specific legal responsibilities, financial risks, and innovative requirements that team leadership simply doesn't match.
By reserving founder status for those who actually build companies from scratch, we protect both professional integrity and consumer understanding.
The alternative is continued erosion of meaningful professional distinctions in an industry that desperately needs more clarity, not less.