Despite ambitious goals, the virtual brokerage eXp Realty is seeing its growth slow amid a lagging market — and the company is unlikely to hit a target Sanford set earlier this year.
All week, Inman is taking a Deep Dive into eXp Realty. We’ll be covering the brokerage’s annual EXPCON event — taking place virtually and in Las Vegas this week. Stay tuned in the coming days for more on eXp, and for future Inman Deep Dives into top brokerages.
EXp World Holdings founder and CEO Glenn Sanford said this week that his goal is to increase his company’s U.S. agent count to as much as 250,000, though he also acknowledged that the shifting market has slowed down growth “pretty quickly” — to the point that it appears poised to miss a growth target mentioned earlier this year.
Sanford made the comments near the end of a fireside chat Thursday evening that was held as part of EXPCON, the company’s annual gathering that took place this week in Las Vegas. During the conversation, Sanford said his company has been hearing from broker-owners who are considering making the jump to eXp because they can “get better economics inside” the firm than they can by “trying to figure out how to support their bricks and mortar and their staffing costs in a slow market.”
The comment speaks to one of eXp’s core stories, which is that it has been a rapidly growing brokerage from its earliest days. The company also announced at the beginning of EXPCON that it has officially reached 85,000 agents worldwide.
In that context, Sanford suggested that the overall number of Realtors in the U.S. may shrink from about 1.5 million to as low as 1.1 million. But he said eXp is still growing now and will continue to do so in the future.
“Our goal is to get to 200,000, 250,000 agents over time in the United States,” he added.
Sanford did not mention a timeline for when he thinks the company might hit that number.
The comment came one year after Sanford, at last year’s…