Steve Israel made the career move of his life in 1992 when he chucked years of experience in commercial construction to join the ranks of professional house hunters.

"In 1991, commercial real estate was in the toilet, so I started looking around for something else," he recalls.

That something else turned out to be an exclusive buyers' brokerage, part of a new trend in real estate that was prevalent in California and Colorado. Unlike traditional real estate agents, buyer brokers are real estate agents who act exclusively on the behalf of home buyers and are in no way beholden to sellers or agencies. The objective is simple: Find the house of the buyer's dreams and negotiate a rock-bottom price.

Buyer brokers, Israel says, are a byproduct of the consumer movement of the 1970s. "I always knew that working in something consumer-oriented would be best for me," he says.

So along with partner Dave Kolakowski, Israel founded Buyer's Edge, an exclusive buyers' brokerage, in Bethesda. Buyer's Edge grew steadily in the following years, until building to a staff of seven agents, all licensed in Virginia, Maryland and D.C. Last year, Buyer's Edge racked up $43 million in sales and $1.2 million in revenue. The brokerage knocks an average of 6 percent off the asking price of each home for its clients, Israel says.

As Buyer's Edge has grown, so has its dependence on the Metropolitan Regional Information System, a subscriber-only real estate database that includes available properties, sold properties, tax reports, assessment data and property histories. The agents scour the listings for their clients, downloading and printing out any that closely match their client's needs.