Three thousand hours.

Sixty-seven thousand in gross commission. Forty-one thousand net. About thirteen dollars and seventy-three cents an hour.

Wade Roberts is at the end of year three in real estate, and that's what he has to show for it. His wife runs an ICU. His daughters are seven and five. His father - the hardest worker he ever knew - died eighteen months ago, and the line Wade can't get out of his head is the one his father always said: work can wait, family can't.

Then Wade meets Terry Bass. She runs a real estate practice Monday through Thursday, is home by four, and clears more in a year than most agents will see in a decade. At a continuing-education class, she asks him one question and he can't answer it.

What follows is a year of Wade learning to ask that question on himself. What he loses to bad leads. What he loses to grinding. What he loses to dinners he meant to be home for. And what comes back when he stops working the way the industry trains him to work.

Home for Dinner is a novel about the real estate business, written for the people in it. It's about the work no one teaches - the work that determines whether the rest of it pays. About the constraint at the center of every solo practice, every brokerage, every team. About what changes when an agent stops chasing volume and starts asking who they're actually trying to serve.

Read it because you've been Wade. Or read it because you don't want to be.

"These people are real. These people are absolutely real. I'm going to require my agents to read this." - Tammy H., Broker/Owner · Hamilton, MT

"Nobody in this industry wants to admit that we go through this. Everybody wants it to look like roses on top." - Megan V., Broker/Owner · Osseo, MI