EXp added 30,000 agents in 2021, inching closer to 100K milestone

EXp Realty’s agent count has skyrocketed a whopping 60 percent from 46,745 agents to just over 75,000 worldwide since February 2021, according to new data released Wednesday by the rapidly rising cloud-based brokerage.

In November, eXp World Holdings reported a total of 68,000 eXp agents worldwide, meaning 10.29 percent of the company’s growth over the past year has occurred in the past four months, eXp World Holdings founder and CEO Glenn Sanford said in a statement. The brokerage added approximately 30,000 agents over the past 12 months, according to the data.

Glenn Sanford | Photo credit: eXp World Holdings

“We are driven to continuously innovate our business model and enhance our agent value proposition, which ultimately delivers great service to homeowners and sellers,” Sanford said in a prepared statement. “Our agent-centric platform is the foundation of our success as the fastest-growing real estate brokerage in the world.”

At the company’s annual conference in November, Sanford shared the audacious goal of reaching 500,000 agents by 2026. Although it has yet to achieve six figures, its latest growth report suggests it’s on track to become one of the largest real estate companies in the U.S., by agent count.

Sanford credited the brokerage’s rapid-fire growth to its culture and ability to attract high-producing teams, which have flocked to the virtual brokerage in hopes of breaking past growth plateaus that can be common with brick-and-mortar setups.

“I tried and tried,” DC-based team leader Jonathan Lahey said in Inman’s June feature about eXp’s team growth.  “I tried to make the numbers work for years. I thought maybe we could do it with different brokerages. But that wasn’t going to work because the overhead isn’t just the franchise and franchise fee. It’s the staff and the office space. We weren’t going to be profitable for years.”

“We’re borderless,” he added. “We literally can expand anywhere we want.”

Although eXp is facing increased competition from franchisors who are retooling their team structures and venturing into more digital-based models, Sanford said he’s confident in eXp’s ability to reach 100,000 agents by the end of 2022 and 500,000 agents by 2026 based on the company’s history of growing its agent count by at least 50 percent every year.

“If we just do the math, then by 2024, [there’s] potential that we would have the largest single real estate brand worldwide by agent count,” Sanford said in Inman’s 2022 eXp outlook. “So that’s just using 50 percent. If we grow something more akin to where we have been growing, we could be there potentially by the end of 2023. So, pretty ambitious growth goals, but I think they’re definitely reasonable just in terms of thinking about where we’re growing to.”

Sanford also said eXp is ahead of the curve with the metaverse, as the company already has a 12-year head start thanks to its virtual world, VirBELA.”Where we’ve always gone is to the 2D version of the 3D immersive experience. Meaning we do it from the desktop, from the laptop. Now from our phones,” he told Inman in November of how VirBELA is evolving. “Through FrameVR.io, we’re able to actually hook together multiple spaces.”

If eXp is able to sustain its growth and reach 500,000 agents, it would make the Seattle-based brokerage a mind-blowing 165 percent bigger than its longtime rival Keller Williams, which eXp is currently battling in Texas courts over the recruitment of Mark Willis, a former KW chief executive officer on the road to to joining eXp in an undisclosed executive role.

They’d also be 48 percent larger than the current agent count leader, Realogy, whose brokerage brands collectively have approximately  337,000 agents across the world. Although plenty of people have faith in the behemoth’s ability to reach half a million agents, there’s one main challenge: having enough agents to do so.

“They just need more bandwidth, which is relatively cheap,” Jay Thompson, a former broker and Zillow executive as well as an Inman contributor told Inman in November about the logistics behind eXp’s plan. “As long as they can scale and shift when needed (and I think they can) in what they offer their agents, in theory, they have no upper constraint.”

“[However], I just don’t think there are enough agent bodies out there for any single brokerage to have 500,000,” he added.

Email Marian McPherson