Daniel Shamooil and the case of the vanishing commission split

A brokerage founder has an agent close a large industrial deal. The commission comes to $400,000. The founder's company has helped with research, marketing and tours. Then comes the part that makes Daniel Shamooil's version of this story worth telling: the company takes none of that commission.

Shamooil recounts the transaction as an example of Voro's Pro membership. The agent had already agreed to pay for access to the brokerage. A larger payday for the agent did not automatically entitle the company to a larger slice. In a business accustomed to discussing percentages, he had chosen to sell a subscription.

There is a pleasing awkwardness to the arrangement. The broker is helping people make money while declining the most obvious opportunity to collect some of it. Yet the underlying proposition is quite ordinary: charge for the service you provide. Shamooil has spent years trying to make that proposition work inside real estate.

Nineteen, and learning New York

His career began in 1999. He started in New York City rentals at 19, an entry point far removed from the polished abstraction of a national brokerage platform. Rentals put a person close to the actual transaction: a particular apartment, a particular client, and the work required to bring them together.

His LinkedIn education history lists Queens College from 2000 to 2004. Those dates overlap with the early years of his real estate career. The resulting outline has two tracks running beside each other: college and a working introduction to the property business. The brokerage founder came after the rental agent.

He eventually opened a retail brokerage of his own. Then the recession took that first business away. In his later account of the experience, the loss sits between his start in rentals and the creation of Voro. The career contains a restart, with the experience of running a conventional firm already behind him.

That sequence gives his later argument some weight. When he talks about what a brokerage should provide, he has occupied both sides of the arrangement. He has worked on transactions and run the organization around them. The practical question becomes how much of that organization an agent needs, and how to charge for it.

A different kind of office

The Voro name was already taking shape in April 2011, when Shamooil filed a trademark application for it. The first website launched in 2012. Today the name expands to Virtual Online Realty Office, an unusually literal description for a business trying to change what an office supplies.

Voro's own history places its first office in Garden City, New York. Its early development was therefore less a disappearance of the office than a reconsideration of its purpose. An agent could affiliate with a brokerage and use its support without organizing the working day around a traditional storefront.

For Shamooil, the agent is also running a business. That makes the relationship more complicated than a company simply handing work to a representative. The agent may bring the client, maintain the relationship and do the legwork. The brokerage provides the structure around that effort. His model gives those contributions a different price.

“At Voro, you are in business for yourself, not by yourself.”

Daniel Shamooil

The phrase describes a tension he keeps returning to. Independence can be attractive until a transaction needs help. Support can be attractive until the bill arrives. Voro's proposition asks agents to treat the brokerage as something they can use while retaining responsibility for their own businesses.

The arithmetic has a personality

That emphasis on costs predates the recent interviews. In July 2017, Shamooil published an article titled “Steep StreetEasy Charges vs. 100% VORO Commission.” In October 2019 came “VORO, A New Real Estate Movement.” The titles show a founder repeatedly making his case in public, beginning with the economics an agent could recognize.

His current pricing makes the argument visible. Voro advertises a Basic membership with no recurring membership charge, an 85% agent commission share and an $8,000 annual cap. Pro is listed at $150 per month or $1,500 per year, with agents retaining 100% of their commissions.

The distinction matters. Keeping 100% of a commission does not make the brokerage free. It changes the way the agent pays for it. The published plan details give the subscription a cost of its own, and the state application may carry additional fees. The useful comparison starts with the whole arrangement.

Read as a portrait of its founder, the pricing suggests where his attention goes: the transaction's economics, the services surrounding it, and the agent's freedom to choose. There is little romance in a membership table. For someone earning a living one closing at a time, that may be part of its appeal.

Southbound, then farther west

In April 2021, Voro announced its entry into Florida, following operations in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Georgia. The announcement described plans to begin in southern and central Florida and operate statewide. It connected the brokerage business with lending, extending the range of services around a property transaction.

Florida also became part of Shamooil's own professional geography. His public profile places him in Boca Raton, where his personal real estate site and Voro list a business presence. The New York connections remain visible in his brokerage work. His career now spans the market where he started and the state where he is based.

Voro's company timeline records expansion into Texas and California in 2023, followed by a 1,000-agent milestone in 2024. These are the company's milestones. They describe the distance traveled from the first website without turning every agent affiliation into a personal transaction by the founder.

The growth also brings other people into view. Christopher Wilson works in agent success and brokerage development. Samantha Singh is operations manager. Tom Karras is listed as broker of record for Texas and California, and Theodore Gounaris for New York. Behind the promise of independence sits an organization with specific responsibilities.

Room for somebody else's sign

One of the more revealing accounts of Shamooil's approach comes through Team Raj Jaggi. The team described valuing the independence it found at Voro, including room to promote its own home-sale guarantee. Rahul recalled Shamooil backing the team's approach when other brokers might have been wary.

The team also developed smaller teams within its larger organization. Shamooil welcomed that structure as a way for both the team and the brokerage to grow. It is a useful example of what his language about autonomy means when somebody asks to arrange a business a little differently.

Another agent, Stacie Rihl, came to Voro after investigating alternatives to a large brokerage. Her work focused on referrals and explaining the buying process to first-time buyers. A conversation with Shamooil helped persuade her to join. Her account puts a person beside the membership proposition: someone seeking a home for a business she wanted to run herself.

These stories describe permission as well as pricing. An agent can be attracted by the cost and remain because the arrangement accommodates the way they work. For a founder building a common platform, allowing that variation is a substantial part of the bargain.

The membership card goes digital

Shamooil's interest in technology has occasionally taken a more experimental turn. In 2022 he discussed Voro's plans for NFT memberships, priced at $600. The proposed perks included discounts and participation in a future metaverse. A membership could also be traded, giving it a different life from a conventional subscription.

“It's a digital asset that you own,” he said at the time. The idea belonged to an exploratory period, and it should be read in that setting. What makes the episode distinctive in his story is the continuity of the question: what can membership in a brokerage give an agent, and what can that membership become?

Still building, still doing deals

By his 2026 Agent Brew appearance, the discussion included a platform of more than 1,300 agents, a rebrand and a new website. Shamooil also talked about using AI tools, including Claude, to build website components and speed up work. The founder of the virtual office was still trying tools himself.

Human connection remained part of the same conversation. That pairing fits a career begun in rentals: software can change the machinery around a transaction while the relationship remains between people. His recent work puts both interests in the same frame, with a larger brokerage to operate and individual agents to serve.

And his name still appears on deals. In July 2026, Shamooil and Yossi Tewel represented the seller on a $1.72 million multifamily sale in Jersey City. Even with a platform to run, there is a recognizable link back to the beginning: a property, a client, and another closing.