In a region where the median home trade routinely puts five or six figures of commission on the closing statement, three Northern Virginia founders are arguing that the most expensive line item in American homeownership is also the most negotiable. Their company, Sellona, is a marketplace that lets owners list their homes for free, lets buyers broadcast what they are looking for, and routes both sides to a roster of local attorneys and other experts who can paper the deal without a traditional listing agent in the middle [ZoomInfo].
The pitch is unusually well-timed. The residential brokerage industry is in the middle of its biggest structural rewrite in a generation, and a small startup based in McLean is betting that the moment belongs to whoever can give a seller a credible path to closing without a percentage-of-price commission attached.
The bet
Sellona's product, as described on its own site and in local press coverage, is a two-sided marketplace with a third rail bolted on. Sellers can post a home with a fixed price or a price range meant to attract offers [Sellona]. Buyers can post what they want and let owners come to them. And both sides can pull from what the company calls an expert marketplace, a directory of attorneys and other transaction professionals who can handle the parts of a deal that genuinely require a license, such as title work, contract review, and disclosures [Sellona]. AI sits underneath, used by the company to match buyers and sellers and to make the transaction, in CEO Sarah McLaren's framing, smarter rather than cheaper alone [wusa9].
The wedge is commission. McLaren has told local outlets that Sellona is built to let buyers and sellers connect directly and skip the percentage fee that has historically gone to listing and buyer agents [wusa9]. In a market where a 5% to 6% total commission on a $900,000 Fairfax County home runs $45,000 to $54,000, even a partial unbundling is real money, and it is money that has typically been invisible to the seller because it comes out of proceeds at closing.
Why it could be big
The tailwind is regulatory and behavioral at the same time. Following the National Association of Realtors settlement that took effect in 2024, buyer-side commissions are no longer presumed and must be negotiated separately, which has cracked open a category that was effectively closed to software for two decades. That is the opening Sellona is walking through. The company is not the only one trying, but the structural shift gives any credible commission-light marketplace a real shot at consumer attention that previously belonged entirely to the multiple listing service and the agents who controlled access to it.
The Northern Virginia geography is also a sensible starting wedge. The Washington metro area combines high transaction prices, a dense population of analytically minded buyers, and a deep bench of real estate attorneys who already handle closings as a matter of state practice. If a seller-direct model works anywhere in the United States on day one, the corridor from Arlington to Loudoun County is a defensible place to test it.
The team
Sellona is run by a three-person founding team with complementary backgrounds. Sarah McLaren, the CEO, came out of Washington Fine Properties, one of the region's higher-end residential brokerages, and studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1999 to 2003 [RocketReach]. Hunter Powers, the co-founder and chief technology officer, has more than 20 years in technology and has previously worked at GLG, Bessemer Venture Partners, Interos, and Basket [RocketReach][Hunter Powers Website]. John Tramonte, the third co-founder, is a practicing real estate attorney and a licensed agent in McLean, Virginia [LinkedIn][Homes.com]. The combination, an industry insider on the brokerage side, an operator-engineer on the technology side, and an attorney who knows what the closing actually requires, is a more practical founding mix than most consumer proptech attempts of the last decade.
In a Medium interview with Authority Magazine, McLaren described the early customer development process as door-to-door, talking with prospective sellers and buyers about their experiences before refining the product. She also talked candidly about the founder learning curve on cap tables, SAFEs, and burn rate, which reads as the voice of someone in the genuinely early innings rather than a polished growth story [Medium].
What bears will say, and what bulls answer
The most credible concern about Sellona is the same concern that has dogged every for-sale-by-owner technology since the early 2000s: most home sellers, even price-sensitive ones, have historically chosen the friction of an agent over the friction of running their own transaction, and Zillow's and Redfin's own attempts to disintermediate the agent have repeatedly bent back toward the traditional model. A pre-seed marketplace in a category where the incumbents are very large and very entrenched is a hard thing to build. The bull answer is that the post-settlement environment is genuinely new, that buyers now have to think about commissions explicitly for the first time, and that a marketplace which pairs free listings with on-call attorneys solves the specific objection ("who handles the paperwork") that killed earlier FSBO software. Sellona's expert marketplace is the part of the product that most directly addresses that objection [Sellona].
What to watch
The next twelve months are about three things. First, transaction volume in the Northern Virginia core market: any credible disclosure of homes listed, homes closed, and gross merchandise value would tell the market whether the model has real consumer pull or only press coverage. Second, the depth of the expert marketplace, since the attorney bench is what makes the product safe to use at scale. Third, a priced funding round. Sellona has been described in local press as an early-stage company [wusa9], and a seed announcement with a named lead would be the clearest signal that institutional investors believe the post-settlement window is large enough to back a Northern Virginia challenger.
The disease state here, to borrow a frame from another beat, is the American homeowner paying tens of thousands of dollars in commission on a transaction they increasingly research themselves. The standard of care is still a listing agent, a buyer's agent, and a percentage fee split between them at closing, with a title company handling the paperwork at the end. Sellona is one of the first venture-scale attempts to write a different prescription. Whether the patient takes it is the story of the next year.
Pulse Raman, Health and Bio Correspondent, on assignment to the proptech desk this week.