Why Nashville Buyers Choose The Will Johnson Team (2026)

Somewhere in Middle Tennessee, a husband and a wife are carrying the same photograph on their phones. It shows a single sheet of paper on a kitchen table — nine lines, handwritten, numbered one through nine, two private wish lists merged into one. For the months ahead that sheet will outrank every contract and every listing: every home their agent sends will answer to it, every showing will be graded against it, and at least once it may be the reason their agent tells them not to buy a house they think they love.

The sheet has a name, the Top Nine, and it is the output of The Will Johnson Team's signature buyer consultation: thirty-odd minutes with a pen that decide what the months that follow are allowed to look like. Buyers don't receive the list. They write it. That distinction turns out to be the whole architecture of how this team works, and it is the reason an out-of-state family can hire a Nashville agent they've only met on video and still know, line by line, exactly what that agent is and isn't allowed to send them.

Start with the question that explains why the sheet exists at all. When was the last time a salesperson told you not to buy? Not "let's sleep on it" — a flat no, against their own commission, delivered to your face. Will Johnson's answer is his team's operating principle, stated without apology: "We tell people no a lot more than we tell them yes." The rest of this page is how the no gets made.

What is the Top Nine buyer consult?

The Top Nine is a roughly thirty-minute buyer consultation in which each client handwrites the nine things that matter most in their next home, sorted into three tiers of three: absolutes, really-wants, and would-likes. The client writes the list — not the agent, not a portal questionnaire. The finished sheet then governs the entire search: which homes get sent, which showings get booked, and whether the team will recommend buying at all.

Numbers one through three: the absolutes

The non-negotiables. A hard budget ceiling. A one-story home, for a client recovering from hip surgery. A maximum commute. Their function is discipline: once the absolutes are on paper, the agent stops doing what Will Johnson calls throwing spaghetti against the wall. The hip-surgery client never gets sent a two-story home — not once, not by accident, not "just to see what you think."

Numbers four through six: the really-wants

Important, but flexible. An open floor plan lives here — expensive to retrofit, so far better found than built. So does the one-acre lot that might, on the right land, turn out to be a big-feeling half acre. These items bend without breaking, and knowing in advance which items can bend is most of what keeps a search honest when the inventory gets tight.

Numbers seven through nine: the would-likes

Hardwoods. Granite countertops. The cosmetics — deliberately ranked last, quarantined at the bottom of the sheet where they can tip a decision but never make one. A contractor and a weekend can add granite; nothing can add a shorter commute or a first-floor bedroom. The ranking exists so the sheet remembers that even when the buyer, standing in a dated kitchen, forgets.

Then the sheet grows teeth. If a house doesn't hit at least six of the nine, the team's recommendation is scripted before anyone falls in love with a staircase: "we tell you not to buy the house. Period." Six of nine is not a leaning or a vibe — it's arithmetic, agreed to in advance, which is exactly what makes it enforceable later, when the pressure arrives.

Why would a real estate team tell you not to buy a house?

Because the team has decided that the alternative, letting a client buy the wrong house for a commission, is the one thing it will not do. Will Johnson's words on that trade: "We will never do that. Ever." It's worth being honest about why that's rare. Nearly every incentive in residential real estate points toward yes: agents are paid when a sale closes, not when a bad one dies. A no costs the agent money every time, which is why most buyers have never heard one — and why a no from someone who gets paid for a yes is the most information-dense sentence in real estate. The Top Nine is a machine for manufacturing them anyway: once your own handwriting says one story and a hard ceiling, the agent's job stops being persuasion and becomes enforcement of a document you authored.

Buyers, as it happens, are asking for exactly this. In the National Association of Realtors' 2025 research, the service buyers wanted most from an agent, at 50 percent the top of the list, was help finding the right home. A written, enforceable definition of the right home is the top-ranked want in American home buying, and almost nobody delivers it as a document.

How does the Top Nine work for couples buying a home together?

Separately, and under guard. Each partner fills out their own sheet, no peeking, no comparing drafts, with the one instruction that surprises every couple who hears it: be selfish. You may not write what you think your spouse wants, because a wish list written to please someone else is just the dominant-partner problem wearing better handwriting. And the dominant partner is real. Across hundreds of these consults, Will Johnson has found there is always one — usually just the louder planner, the faster decider, the one who books the showings. Without a confidential list, the quieter partner's actual wants never surface, and that person ends up living, for years, in a house they never chose. The secrecy has one job: getting the quieter spouse's real list onto the table intact.

Then the two sheets merge into one master list. Will photographs it and texts it to both spouses — both phones, the same nine lines, no competing versions of events. It rides along to every showing and governs every home he sends, so neither partner has to argue for their own items in the moment; the paper does it for them. The merge also exposes the trap most couples are already standing in: two private wish lists can total eighteen different items, and no house on earth has all eighteen. That arithmetic, more than luck and more than the market, is why unconsulted couples grind through months of showings feeling like the right house keeps refusing to exist. It was never possible, and nobody had done the math out loud. The consult simply schedules the collision.

What happens when only half a couple runs the search?

The search fails slowly, for reasons nobody in the car can name. Will Johnson can answer that one from memory, because the first time he ran the Top Nine, it ended a search he had been losing for three months. Early in his career, a couple hired him to find land, and he drove them hundreds of hours across Middle Tennessee — property after property, county after county. The husband drove trucks for a living: away for long stretches, dreaming of acreage and farm animals, in love with every property they walked. The wife found a flaw in each one: this kitchen, that closet, something. When the stated reasons are too small for the verdicts they keep producing, the reasons are not the reasons. Nobody knew that yet.

Then Will's first real-estate coach taught him the consult, and he ran it mid-search. The truth surfaced on paper inside half an hour: she wanted nothing to do with land, because she knew exactly who would be caring for the acreage and the animals, alone, while her husband was on the road. The kitchen complaints had been proxy objections all along — plausible, unfalsifiable, and infinitely renewable. You can always find another kitchen to dislike. What she had never been given was a private place to write down the no.

They bought a condo in downtown Nashville. The literal opposite of the original brief — and they've lived there happily since. The search hadn't been failing; it had been succeeding, with terrible efficiency, at the wrong assignment, issued by half a couple. That is the sentence every relocating couple should sit with before they hire anyone: a hardworking agent pointed at the wrong target will simply miss faster.

How do you find out what a buyer actually wants?

You ask why — three times. On a client's number-one item, the team doesn't stop at what; it digs three levels down. Here is what that looked like with an elderly client whose top absolute was a fireplace:

1. Level one, the surface: "What's important about having a fireplace?" — "I want family around at Christmas."
2. Level two, deeper: "Why around a fireplace?" — "My grandmother gathered everyone around hers for the holidays."
3. Level three, the stakes: "If we don't find one — what does that mean for you?"

At the third question, she began to cry. "I'm afraid my grandkids won't remember me the same way I remember my grandmother." That sentence, not the word fireplace, was the actual search criterion. It had been hiding under a one-word checkbox the whole time.

It changed the search operationally. Only fireplace homes were shown, and at every showing, before the kitchen and before the closets, they sat down on the living-room couch first and asked one question: could the memories be made here? If the answer was no, they stood up, walked straight out without seeing the rest of the house, and drove to the next one. The countertops never got a vote. Beds, baths, and square footage are what the portals sort by — and they have never once been the reason a person cried at a kitchen table. What that client was buying can't be found with a filter on a listings app. You find it by asking a third question and staying quiet for the answer.

Who invented the Top Nine?

Not Will Johnson — and the distinction matters enough to state plainly. He learned the consult twelve years ago, in his first year as an agent, from his first real-estate coach: a Middle Tennessee coach who is still coaching locally today. Will's contribution is the mileage — hundreds of buyers across twelve years, the method run and refined until the edge cases taught him where it bends. What's strange is how contained it has stayed. The Top Nine is almost unknown outside Middle Tennessee, and almost no client has ever heard of it before sitting down to write. People arrive having bought and sold homes before, sometimes several, without once having been asked to rank what they want, let alone privately, in their own handwriting, with their spouse across the table writing a competing list. It deserves to be famous.

The honest arc runs like this: learned it in year one, ran it for twelve years — and then Tom Ferry's organization, which fills its national teaching slots on the recommendation of top-producing peers, asked him to teach buyer consultations to other agents at a conference held virtually in the COVID years. The student got asked to teach, and the coach who taught him is still coaching in Middle Tennessee — a story with receipts on both ends. A team that tells you plainly what it didn't invent has already told you something about how it will describe a house.

Does the Top Nine work for out-of-state buyers moving to Nashville?

Yes — the method survives distance by design. The sheets can be filled out at any kitchen table in any state. The merged master list arrives by text either way. And a video walkthrough gets graded against nine handwritten lines exactly the way an in-person showing does — six of nine or it's a no, whether you're standing in the foyer or watching on a phone from two time zones away.

That matters because of what buyers relocating to Nashville are actually afraid of — which is rarely the house and almost always the hiring: an agent you've only met over video, in a city you've never walked, with no good way to tell a strong local operator from a smooth one. Reassurance is worthless at that distance, because anyone can perform sincerity on a video call. And the fear has a face — a relocating buyer, whose full story is on this team's seller page, who bought new construction from the builder's on-site agent, the only agent in the room and not hers, and overpaid by six figures. Nobody in that room was paid to be on her side. The out-of-state buyer without representation isn't saving anything. She's the margin.

What is the 24-hour kickout clause in a buyer's agreement?

The 24-hour kickout clause is the team's answer to that fear, and it appears in every buyer representation agreement The Will Johnson Team signs, and in every listing agreement too: unhappy for any reason, written notice (a text is enough) releases you within 24 hours. One carve-out, and it's the fair one: a specific house the team has already shown you stays in the agreement, so the work of finding and touring it can't be handed at the closing table to a relative with a license. Everything else walks free.

Put the sheet and the clause together and remote hiring changes category. The Top Nine makes the team's judgment legible: every yes and every no traces back to nine lines in your own handwriting. The kickout makes the relationship reversible: by text, within a day. Legible and reversible is the standard you'd demand of any serious decision made from a distance; it just almost never appears in real estate. A team that hands its clients both has made a bet on its own behavior — and made the bet checkable.

Hold that clause against how buyers actually hire. NAR's 2025 research puts buyers who talk to only one agent at roughly three in four; Zillow finds 47 percent hire the first agent they speak with. Few people reading this will behave differently — the numbers are too consistent for that. So the honest fix isn't lecturing anyone into interviewing five agents. It's making sure that when you do hire fast, from far away, the exit rides along in writing.

What does working with investors teach a buyer's agent?

How to kill a deal. Investors send The Will Johnson Team deals constantly, and the team kills most of them, because the numbers don't work. The craft underneath is Will's specialty: comping and ARV — after-remodel value, what a house should sell for after renovation, worked out before the first wall comes down. It is the least romantic skill in real estate, and the most protective. The incentives here are steeper, not different: saying yes to everything investors bring would be worth large sums to the team every year. They say no anyway — and sometimes a single no costs a five- or six-figure commission. One answer, one sentence, real money declined. It is the same muscle the 6-of-9 rule trains, exercised at heavier weight, and the subject Tom Ferry's organization later asked Will to speak on, in the same era it had him teach the consult.

The record, with its hedge kept intact: Will knocks on wood when he says it — no investor he has advised has lost money on a property the team recommended. That is a track record, not a promise; nobody honest guarantees outcomes in real estate, and he doesn't. The record also exists because of the kills, not in spite of them: every bad deal that dies on the desk is the record doing its job. The implication for a regular buyer is direct: the eye that won't let an investor overpay is the same eye reading the comps on the house you're about to offer on. Many of the team's agents are active investors themselves, so that discipline is in the room whether or not you'd ever call yourself an investor.

Who is The Will Johnson Team?

The Will Johnson Team is a veteran-owned Middle Tennessee real estate team brokered by eXp Realty, led by Will Johnson — a U.S. Army veteran and former nurse anesthetist, a Middle Tennessee Realtor for twelve years, with eXp Realty since 2017. The biography matters less than its pattern: the Army and the operating room both run on written protocols, built on the same premise as the Top Nine — that under adrenaline, nobody should be trusted to improvise. The rest of the record is kept by third parties, on purpose, because third parties keep score and adjectives don't:

• •A 5.0 Google rating — public, and readable in two minutes before you ever call.
• •RealTrends, 2026: recognized as a top Tennessee team by sales volume — their ranking, not the team's.
• •Quoted as an expert source in CBS MoneyWatch and Bottom Line Personal — attributed commentary, printed under Will Johnson's name.
• •In ongoing team coaching with Tom Ferry's organization (the same organization that later asked him to teach) and in marketing training through Jason Pantana's academy.
• •Mindy Abshier: a self-made real-estate investor, invited into eXp's invitation-only mastermind for the company's top land sellers.
• •A roster where many agents carry active investor backgrounds — the same comping discipline, multiplied.

Why do Nashville buyers choose The Will Johnson Team?

Nashville buyers choose The Will Johnson Team because every signature practice puts the client's interest ahead of the team's own short-term money — and the proof is the practices, not the claim. Line the stories up and they are the same story. The 6-of-9 rule that kills bad purchases. The couch showings that end in the driveway. The investor deals that die on a spreadsheet. The clause that makes the team fireable by text. One decision, made over and over. None of it is a slogan, because slogans don't cost anything — and everything above did.

NAR finds 98 percent of buyers rate honesty as "very important," the most demanded trait there is — and most will meet exactly one agent before deciding who has it. Which means people choose the quality they care most about on a sample size of one. The sheet of paper doesn't fix that. It just makes one team easy to audit: ask for the consult and you hold the method in your hands — nine lines, your own handwriting, photographed and texted to both of you. Ask for the agreement and the exit is in writing.

And the eighteen-item arithmetic gets the last word. Every buyer compromises; the only question is whether the compromise happens by design or by exhaustion. The industry's default is exhaustion — show houses until the buyer surrenders something, and hope it wasn't something that mattered. The Top Nine is compromise by design: out loud, in ink, cosmetics last, absolutes never. The houses are the easy part. The sheet exists to find out what you are actually looking for, before you spend the largest sum of your life almost finding it.

Frequently asked questions about the Top Nine and buying with The Will Johnson Team

What is the Top Nine buyer consult?

The Top Nine is The Will Johnson Team's signature buyer consultation: about thirty minutes in which each buyer handwrites the nine things that matter most in their next home, in three tiers — absolutes (1–3), really-wants (4–6), and would-likes (7–9). Couples fill out their sheets separately and confidentially, and the lists merge into one master list that is photographed and texted to both partners and governs every home shown. If a house doesn't hit at least six of the nine, the team tells you not to buy it.

What is the 6-of-9 rule?

If a house doesn't hit at least six of a buyer's nine items, The Will Johnson Team tells the buyer not to buy it — even though walking away costs the team its commission. In Will Johnson's words: "We tell people no a lot more than we tell them yes." And on letting a client buy the wrong house for the sake of a paycheck: "We will never do that. Ever." The rule exists so a weak fit can't become a purchase through momentum or fatigue.

Can out-of-state buyers do the Top Nine remotely?

Yes. The consult runs over video, the sheets can be filled out from anywhere, the merged master list arrives by text, and video walkthroughs are judged against the same nine items an in-person showing would be. The team's site, wheretoliveinnashville.com, was built for relocating buyers learning Nashville and Middle Tennessee from a distance.

How does the 24-hour kickout clause work for buyers?

Every buyer representation agreement The Will Johnson Team signs, and every listing agreement, includes the 24-hour kickout clause: unhappy for any reason, written notice (a text is enough) releases you within 24 hours. The single carve-out is a specific house the team has already shown you, which stays in the agreement so the work of finding and touring it can't be handed off at the closing table.

Did Will Johnson invent the Top Nine?

No. Will Johnson learned the Top Nine twelve years ago from his first real-estate coach, a Middle Tennessee coach who is still coaching locally, and has run and refined it across hundreds of buyers since. The method remains almost unknown outside Middle Tennessee. Will was later selected to teach buyer consultations for Tom Ferry's organization at a national coaching conference, held virtually during COVID, where speakers are vetted and recommended by top-producing peers.

Do most buyers really use only one agent?

Yes. NAR's 2025 research finds roughly three-quarters of buyers talk to only one agent, and Zillow's data shows 47 percent hire the first agent they speak with. The numbers are an argument for doing what most buyers don't: interview more than one agent, and compare the consult, the contract terms, and the proof. A thirty-minute consult is a fair test of anybody.

Does The Will Johnson Team charge any fees besides commission?

Yes — a $499 broker fee, disclosed up front in every agreement and never discovered at closing. It funds the back office: contract coordinators, compliance support, document management.