Martin at a train station in Tacoma WA
Anderson Kim
Marguerite Martin ditched the grind, invented a new business model, and built the most civic-minded corner of an industry that doesn’t always deserve one.
“Every client deserves to work with an expert,” she says. “The old model asked one agent to serve everyone. My model asks: who is genuinely the best person for this specific client, in this specific neighborhood? And then I make that introduction.”
Real estate is one of the last industries where the hustle culture remains almost completely intact. Agents are told to work every weekend, call every lead, and never stop grinding. The model hasn’t changed much in decades: build a personal brand, work every transaction yourself, and if you want to scale, recruit a team that does the work while you take the cut.
Marguerite Martin has been a licensed real estate agent since 2005. Instead of climbing the traditional ladder, she spent two decades quietly building something the industry had no name for – until she named it herself.
Today, Martin runs MovetoTacoma.com, a place-based content ecosystem that connects prospective buyers and sellers with a curated network of specialist agents. She earns referral fees – and – she works entirely remotely. For years, she ran her company from Portland, Oregon, then globally as she traveled to Taiwan, Italy, the UK and more.
One could argue that she has invented the only truly remote job in real estate.
From Agent to Architect
In 2015, Martin launched MovetoTacoma.com – not as a lead generation page, but as a genuine resource for people considering a move to Tacoma, Washington. She built a clickable neighborhood map with videos, median home prices, and candid quotes from residents. She started the Move to Tacoma Podcast, interviewing mayors, nonprofit leaders, activists, artists, and business owners – anyone who could help an outsider understand how Tacoma actually works.
The podcast is now eleven years old and has surpassed 100 episodes. It spawned a local podcast network, Channel253 which has podcasts dedicated to civic life, politics, race and gender, and more. This body of work is not a sales tool. It is a civic document.
“Real estate agents have this opportunity that almost no other profession has,” Martin says. “You become deeply embedded in a place. You know the neighbors, the schools, the politics. Most agents use that knowledge to close deals. I decided to use it to build something that serves everyone in the community – not just buyers and sellers.”
The Referral Model: A Better Way to Scale
The traditional team model in real estate has a dirty secret: the agents doing most of the work often earn the least. Team leaders often take 50% or more of every commission, in exchange for leads and a brand name. The hierarchy is steep, and the economics favor only the person at the top.
Martin’s model flips this. She operates as a full-time referral agent – no longer representing buyers and sellers directly, but matching clients with specialist agents who are genuine experts in specific Tacoma neighborhoods. The agent doing the work keeps roughly 70% of the commission (before their brokerage split). Martin earns a referral fee. Everyone wins more than they would under the old model.
In under three years of running this model full-time, she closed over 150 referrals – without a team or a dedicated office.
Martin sitting on a stool
Rippervision
No Degree. Plenty of Credentials.
Martin doesn’t have a college degree. She’ll tell you that plainly, and without apology. What she has instead is twenty years of hyper-local knowledge, a civic network most people spend a lifetime building, and a media platform she created from scratch.
The industry took notice. Inman named her to their Influencers List. The National Association of Realtors recognized her as a Fair Housing Champion in 2021. The Tacoma Chamber of Commerce gave her the Popham Award for building community spirit. The Women’s Council of Realtors named her Entrepreneur of the Year for developing and teaching the referral model to other agents – not just demonstrating that it worked, but training her peers to replicate it.
She has since trained agents at Windermere, West + Main Homes, Coldwell Banker, John L. Scott, and other major brokerages. She is, in effect, teaching the industry to do what she figured out without any formal instruction*.
Three Trends She Saw Coming
Martin has been telling agents for years that the rules are changing. Three shifts, in particular, define what success looks like in 2026.
- Experts win. Generalists are losing ground to agents who build deep knowledge in a specific geography or client type. Buyers and sellers can tell the difference, and they’re choosing accordingly.
- Network capital beats transactional capital. The agents who will lead the next decade aren’t the ones with the most listings – they’re the ones with the most trust. Trust compounds slowly, built through consistent presence in a community, not just when there’s a deal to close.
- Civic credibility is a competitive advantage. In an industry with a reputation for aggressive and predatory tactics, genuine community investment is a differentiator. Martin has built her entire brand on the idea that a real estate professional can show up for a city on its own terms — and that the business will follow.
Ecosystems, Not Empires
Martin has a phrase she returns to often: she is building an ecosystem, not an empire. An empire extracts value and concentrates it at the top. An ecosystem creates conditions where multiple people can thrive. The specialist agents in her network earn more per transaction than they would on most teams. The community gets a genuinely useful city guide. The people who move to Tacoma through her platform arrive better informed and better matched.
“Being the best agent in the city isn’t enough anymore,” she says. “The 21st century is rewarding something different: leaders who build ecosystems instead of empires, who make the whole community stronger, not just their own bottom line.”
No college degree required.
Marguerite Martin is the founder of MovetoTacoma.com, host of the Move to Tacoma Podcast, Co-founder of Channel 253, and a real estate trainer and coach. She has been a licensed real estate agent at Windermere Professional Partners since 2005.
*Martin is a certified executive coach with a certificate from the Henley Business School.
