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The Journal · 01 · Real Estate

Trust in a Low-Trust Market

No. 020 Essay November 1, 2026 Pieter Studio

Seventeen percent of Americans rate real estate agents high for honesty, and 91 percent of buyers would hire their own agent again. The gap between those two numbers is where every new client decides. The agent who takes the risk out of the first decision wins the first decision, and that is what a guarantee is for.

Two people across a table. Trust still starts there.Studio
Two people across a table. Trust still starts there.

Two numbers

Gallup asks Americans to rate the honesty and ethics of professions, and real estate agents have never done well. In the December 2025 survey, 17 percent rated agents high or very high, 56 percent average and 26 percent low or very low. Gallup's published readings for the profession run 20 percent in 2011, 20 in 2015, 25 in 2018, 24 in 2022 and 17 in 2025, so the latest is the lowest of them.

The National Association of Realtors asks a different population a different question. In its 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 91 percent of buyers said they would use their agent again or recommend them, 76 percent said they definitely would, and 62 percent already had. The public does not trust agents. Clients trust their agent. Both things are true at once, and an agent who wants to grow has to be hired by the public before they can be trusted by a client.

A room where referrals come from, not a platform.Studio
A room where referrals come from, not a platform.

The first decision

The gap matters most at the moment a household picks an agent, because that moment is short and rarely repeated. In the same NAR profile, 74 percent of buyers interviewed only one agent and 80 percent of sellers contacted only one. The decision is made once, usually on a referral, and the agent who was not in the room does not get a second look. A referral is the market's own guarantee: a friend has already taken the risk and reported back, which is why the household feels no need to interview anyone else.

So the question for an agent whose name is not yet known is how to be the first call for a stranger in a market where strangers assume the worst. A low price does not do it, since a stranger who distrusts agents assumes the price has a catch, and every agent has the same credentials. What moves a stranger is a reason to believe that if the agent is wrong, the stranger does not pay for it.

What a guarantee is for

A guarantee is a transfer of risk from the person deciding to the person asking to be hired, and it works in proportion to how little the two of them know each other. An agent with twenty years and a hundred past clients does not need one; the referral already carries the risk. An agent in year two, or an agent in a new market, is asking strangers to trust a profession that 83 percent of them do not rate highly, and a guarantee is the plainest way to say the agent will carry that risk for them.

The same logic applies to us. We ask agents to trust a membership they have not used, in an industry where every vendor promises leads and most agents have been burned by one. So we hold ourselves to the standard we are describing, and nothing we promise lives anywhere except the membership page and the paper behind it.

A kitchen conversation a buyer remembers longer than an ad.Studio
A kitchen conversation a buyer remembers longer than an ad.

Written for counsel first

A guarantee is also an advertising claim, and a claim the contract does not back is a liability for whoever made it. So ours is drafted as a contract clause before it is drafted as a sentence on a page: what counts, what does not, how long the window is, how the member gives notice and what comes back. Counsel reads it before the page does, and when the page carries the line, the clause already backs every word of it. Anyone who asks what a guarantee covers should be handed the clause, with its definitions, and the page should say nothing the clause does not.

We think every agent should hold their own guarantee to the same standard. A promise to a stranger in a low-trust market is worth what the paper behind it says, and the agents who are trusted by 91 percent of their clients got there by keeping promises that were written down. The membership page says what we promise and what it costs.

Sources

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