The Protect The Seller Circle: How Kati Spaniak Is Asking Agents to Put Honesty in Writing

After nearly 15 years in real estate, more than 700 personal transactions, and close to half a billion dollars in closed volume, Kati Spaniak had seen enough. She had watched inexperienced agents cost sellers tens of thousands of dollars. She had watched experienced agents stay silent when silence was the wrong choice. And she had grown exhausted watching an industry full of genuinely good people fail to say, out loud and in writing, what good actually looked like.

So she built something to fix it.

Appearing on the Real Estate Excellence Podcast with host Tracy Hayes, Kati walked through the origin, the architecture, and the ambition behind the Protect The Seller Circle, a free movement asking agents across the country to sign ten specific promises, reviewed by a real person, renewed every year, and revocable if broken.

"I truly believe what I'm doing is going to change the real estate industry. There's never been a concerted effort or a movement to put this first to the sellers, to the industry, to consumers."

Why Reviews and Awards Are Not Enough

The problem Kati set out to solve is deceptively simple to state and genuinely difficult to fix. A homeowner preparing to sell faces one of the largest financial transactions of their life with almost no reliable way to separate an honest agent from one who is simply better at marketing themselves.

Most industry designations, as Kati pointed out bluntly, can be purchased. Review platforms capture customer satisfaction after the fact, but they do not tell a seller what an agent actually believes before the listing agreement is signed. The result is a system where trust is demanded at precisely the moment a seller can least afford to be wrong.

Kati's answer was to stop asking agents to claim they were honest and start asking them to define what honest means, specifically, and to sign it.

The Ten Promises

The Protect The Seller Circle is built around ten commitments that agents sign before joining. They are not vague aspirations. Each one addresses a specific failure point that Kati had observed over thousands of referrals and years of direct interaction with sellers who called her frustrated, confused, or crying about the agents they had hired.

The promises include commitments to always tell clients the truth, to put clients' profit before the agent's own paycheck, to never buy a listing with a price the agent knows is too high, to be completely transparent about all fees up front, to name every conflict of interest before being asked, to consult rather than pressure, to maintain clear communication standards, to protect clients even at the cost of losing their business, to hold themselves accountable when no one is watching, and to never embellish transaction counts or experience.

Kati was careful to explain what joining the Circle does and does not mean. It is free, always. Signing does not cost an agent anything, and it does not generate leads. The Protect The Seller Circle is not a referral network. It is a standard.

"We would rather an agent join the Circle because they believe the ten promises than because they are expecting business from it."

Who Is Signing First

One of the more revealing details Kati shared on the podcast was which agents moved fastest when the Circle launched. It was not the newer agents looking for an edge. It was the veterans.

"We have agents who have sold 1,000, 2,000, 4,000 homes," Kati said. "They were the first ones to sign. They were the first ones to say, 'Oh my gosh, we totally need this.'"

That pattern tracks with a broader observation Kati has made across her years of building the Truth in Real Estate referral network: experienced agents understand the cost of not saying these things out loud. They have watched colleagues buy listings with inflated prices, leave sellers in the dark for days, and avoid the cancellation conversation because it felt uncomfortable. They have seen what those silences cost. Signing a document that names those silences and commits to ending them is not threatening to an agent with thousands of closings behind them. It feels like relief.

Newer agents, by contrast, sometimes struggle with the specificity. A promise like "I will never buy a listing with a price I know is too high" requires understanding what buying a listing actually means, a concept that experienced agents grasp immediately but that genuinely requires education for someone who has not yet seen the pattern play out.

A Conversation Starter, Not a Rulebook

Kati was deliberate about framing the Circle not as a policing mechanism but as a conversation starter. The ten promises give agents something concrete to bring to a listing appointment, a written commitment they can place in front of a prospective seller and say, without any hedging, that this is how they do business.

"How many agents are walking into a listing meeting saying, 'I'm honest, and I can prove it. Here it is right here'?" she asked during the podcast.

From the seller's side, the movement works in the opposite direction. Kati is actively educating consumers, through her YouTube channel with over 85,000 subscribers, through her Facebook group, and through her forthcoming book, Sell Your Home Without Blowing Up Your Life, to understand what the Circle represents and to bring the ten questions to any agent they are considering hiring.

The result is a loop. Agents who sign gain a tool for building trust faster. Sellers who know about the Circle gain a framework for vetting agents before they sign anything. Neither side needs Kati in the room for the conversation to happen.

Accountability That Actually Means Something

The Circle is not permanent by default, and that is intentional. Membership is reviewed annually. An agent who breaks the commitment is removed.

Kati acknowledged directly that some agents will sign and not live up to what they signed. She has seen enough of the industry to hold no illusions about that. But she argued that the act of signing still matters, because it forces an agent to confront, in writing, a standard they have now publicly attached their name to.

"They may never have been told by their brokerage, and certainly not by their association, to put this in front of sellers and say, 'We are protecting the consumer.'"

The Circle is also completely broker-agnostic. Kati is with eXp Realty, but she was emphatic that the movement is not recruiting and does not favor any brokerage. An agent who signs carries the commitment with them regardless of where they hang their license.

How to Join

Agents interested in joining the Protect The Seller Circle can do so at protecttheseller.com. Kati described the process as straightforward: answer ten questions, sign the commitment, and the membership is in place. No fee, no upsell, no requirement to accept referrals from Truth in Real Estate.

The ask is simply this: mean what you sign.

For the sellers watching Kati's channel and following her content, the Circle offers something the industry has not previously been able to provide. Not a logo. Not a review score. A standard, in writing, attached to a real agent's name, backed by someone who has personally reviewed thousands of agents and has spent over a decade making the case that the consumer deserves better.

Whether the movement scales the way Kati believes it will depends, she said, on agents deciding that this is the kind of industry they want to be part of. The paperwork is simple. The decision behind it is not small at all.