Welcome to another episode of the Atlanta Realtors Association's Rundown, the number one podcast for realtors in Georgia. I'm your host, Helen Hernandez Archer, and today I'm joined by an industry titan and a personal friend, Leo Pareja. From becoming the number one agent at Keller Williams by the age of 28 and co-founding tech platforms like Remind, to today's leading eXp Realty as CEO, Leo's impact on real estate is unmatched. Beyond these titles, Leo and I go way back through our work together with NAR and working in different companies together over the years, where I've seen his deep commitment to scaling businesses and empowering Latino leaders firsthand. Today, we're getting candid about his journey, the raw failures, the massive wins, and his best advice for the next generation of entrepreneurs. Let's jump in. Welcome, Leo.
Thanks for having me, Helen. I'm excited to be here with you.
Thank you. Thank you. So, Leo, at 23 — and I've heard you speak many times, but for our audience, I wanted to ask some of these questions because there's a lot of realtors here in Atlanta that do not know your story. And I know them. I know some of them, but I wanted to really go deep into these questions. So, Leo, at 23, you were on top of the world. And by 24 years old, during the 2008 crash, that wiped you out — from the millions of dollars that you were doing to negative one million. Most people hide their failures, but you talk openly about crying in a fetal position in your car and returning your BMW. When you were sitting in that room broke, what core belief about yourself had to die so you could rebuild?
Yeah, that's a fantastic question, and I often say it, and I actually have hats and swag with it. My favorite word in the English language is context. And I feel like having context is a superpower if you can always go to that place in almost all aspects. So in the way you're asking me, I was 23, I was single, I was not responsible for human beings yet. I was dating Ariana, but we weren't married yet. So going through that is probably the best age I could have wished for it to happen. Like losing everything as a father and a husband psychologically would have been very different. But losing it at 23 was everything to me in that moment. But in hindsight, it was like I could live on someone's couch and feed myself. So the reframe that I've taken from that, that I apply to everything in life, because actually the question I get often is like, how does it feel, a day in the life, that kind of standard question. And I always tell people as an entrepreneur, my highs are higher and my lows are lower, right? So I have some very amazing euphoric moments when we do something really big, but at the same time, when I have a bad day, it's a bad day. And that's kind of been the entire journey. But when you can reframe and actually go to a space of, am I healthy? Like, very personal, one of my childhood best friends called me yesterday and told me I had stage two rectal cancer, 44 years old, married with four kids, right? When you can think through, a business failure is not your health. Do you still have a roof over your head? Are your kids fed? Is your home 72 degrees? Like, it's not that serious, right? You've lost the listing appointment. The buyer picked somebody else. The closing got pushed. The deal blew up. Are your important people okay? Right? Are your mom and dad okay? Are they alive? Do you guys have food in the fridge? 'It's okay' is a very powerful reframe. And that normally comes from losing everything, right? Like when I lost — I went from 14 rental properties and a beautiful condo with a BMW X5 at 23 to nothing, giving it all back. And also remembering that it's all temporary, right? One of the coolest parts of this role is we travel the entire summer as a family, because as soon as the kids are out of school, we take the show on the road and I try to see as many agents as possible. This summer we went to five countries and I saw a thousand international agents in person. That's double-digit percentages of our entire international population. But the part is, we lived in a two-bedroom with just about a carry-on, right? And like a little kitchen and a washer and dryer in one unit, and we had to hang the clothes out to dry for like a month in Portugal. And you realize you don't need that many things. You don't need that much stuff. And for me, the definition of home is having my humans with me, right? And so it's a very active exercise. And one of the awesome gifts of life is losing stuff, right? Like my kids are 11 and 9, and right now I think about education and what's important in the future. And my son does jiu-jitsu, and I can tell you the most important thing that I want him to get out of it is learning to lose, right? Because I think society and school, it's almost like we've gotten rid of losing. Like there's always a ribbon. There's always an ability to retake the test. That's not how life works, right?
You always get a medal. You always get a medal. No matter whether you're the winner or the second or the third, you always get a medal.
But guess what? When you lose at the listing appointment, you don't get a participation.
There's no medals. No medal. Did you get the contract or not? And then you rebuild. So, you did rebuild. You became number one at Keller Williams by 28. So, let's not forget that you lost everything. You became now the number one agent at Keller Williams by 28. That's when I met you. And you've been honest about waking up in the morning after hitting that goal and feeling completely empty. What does that teach young entrepreneurs about what they're actually chasing, or what we are all actually chasing?
Yeah. The interesting part is I don't know that you could learn it any other way, right? I think Jim Carrey has famously said, 'I wish upon everybody achieving all their financial success because then they'll realize that it's empty and meaningless,' right? And anyone who's seen someone like the founder of, I think, Roblox, sold for like a billion dollars, and then he was like, 'I've never been so sad or not knowing what to do.' And if you read the comments on posts like that, people are like, 'I wish I had that problem. Like, let me figure that out.' [clears throat] But what I learned through that process is when you chase an external goal with the hope or thought that it's going to give you something, right, you're going to find this thing inside of you externally, I think that's when most people are shocked. And there are large studies that have attempted to define happiness and where it comes from, and I find it a fascinating concept. And my mom has a PhD in psychology, so I was raised around a lot of research. And what some studies, and I heard Tony Robbins quote it at an event, was that when you look across time, culture, governments, independent of the moment in time, the only commonality in the concept of happiness is progress. And I think it goes to the definition of, you know, it's the journey, not the destination, right? Like achieving a goal typically won't give you fulfillment in arriving at the goal. It's who you become in the process of the goal, right? Like what I misunderstood in becoming number one or 30 Under 30, which were like my obsession in my 20s, was I became a business person, right? I went from a self-employed good agent to an operator, right? And that was a big shift. I went from like, okay, as a self-employed agent, I actually became really, really good at scripts. Like I think till this day I would go head-to-head with you guys and beat you on a listing appointment even though I haven't taken a listing in 16 years because I obsessed with the process, the questions, the qualifying questions to the tie-down to all the emotional way of asking questions because that's what you're like — we make emotional decisions and then justify them logically. So making sure that the questions are getting to the emotional decision as to why you decided to move. And let's say at some point I got to where like 72% conversion. Like if I went on a listing appointment, three out of four times I was walking out with the listing, but then I ran out of time. Like I could only go on X amount of appointments based on traffic in the DC metropolitan area, right? I could only do X amount in a day. And then I became a business owner when I figured out how to create leverage and I could do 10 times the amount of business through leverage. But it's a process. And what I didn't appreciate in my 20s when I strived for that goal is that process and behavior is what gave me the ability to then scale businesses, right? It's what gives me the ability to run an 87,000-person organization, 29 countries doing $5 billion in revenue. It's the exact same skill sets along the way. I've learned, I would say, new languages — and not español, but like venture capital, public equities, right? Like I didn't know what, you know, CAC to LTV, all these little things.
So going back to the scaling part, because you mentioned something that relates to a lot of agents, and that is you were going from appointment to appointment, which is what I do. But then you went to getting accounts — because I know this from you — getting accounts with banks, and so now it's one listing, it will be maybe 20, 30, 100 properties. So walk us through that process into, okay, I don't have enough time, but I could do this. How did that happen? Because I know the story, but I want you to say it.
Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, it was very real. I was at a Keller Williams family reunion and a gentleman from Florida, from Tallahassee, named Gene Frederick — or not Gene Frederick, somebody else — was teaching a class and he said, 'I don't go on a listing appointment unless I can get 5, 10, 15, 20 listings at a time.'
Gene Rivers. Gene Rivers. Wrong Gene. And I was like, wait, what? That's on the menu? I can do that? Like that's an option? And again, knowing that I was really, really good at listings, I was like, well, I want to take 10 at a time, 15 at a time, 20 at a time. And it was just that one unlock, right? I think life sometimes is just one inch, one millimeter. And I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait. That's available. And I pivoted my entire world to that. And that gave me leverage for the first time. So, I'm most known for being able to do that with REO, but I was doing it way before REO. Like the Hispanic Committee of Virginia was this nonprofit organization that empowered Latinos across any subject from their taxes to immigration stuff, but they taught a first-time homebuyer seminar and I taught it every Saturday. And that was the first time where I was like, I have one relationship that creates many opportunities on a recurring basis, right? So I maintain one relationship. And by the way, that's the concept to me that I built my entire business on throughout a decade across multiple market cycles, where it's the same thing of doing business by referral, but with one human, where one-to-one meant one-to-many. So I taught one class on a Saturday, but 40 people showed up and I was endorsed by this organization. And again, it was not a sales pitch. I just genuinely taught, like, these are the things to look for. Make sure there's no prepayment penalties on your mortgages back in 2002, 2003.
But then I figured again, I lived in the DC metropolitan area and I'm Latino and I very much leaned into whatever hand I'm dealt in life. And I went down to the World Bank and the international development banks and all of those world organizations and said, 'Who helps you with your rentals?' And they were like, 'We can't even find someone to help us with our rentals.' And so I would drive around these executives from Latin America to do a rental because nobody wanted to help them. And it turned out in two or three years they'd buy very expensive homes, right? So like if the mean average price was like 350, they were buying $600,000 homes because they were just renting for the first year or two until they got their head around which way the traffic patterns were and if that's the county they wanted to be in. But very early on I was like, I can have one institutional corporate type of relationship that then turns into many transactions. And that's what I did with REO, that's what I did with hedge funds, that's what I did with developers and builders, where it's like I can build a very real one-to-one relationship. And by the way, in each one of them I had to learn a language, right? Like I've never attempted to do military relocation just because there are agents who are so much better at that because they just retired from the military and speak that language deeply. Like they know by rank what your voucher and housing bill allowances are and how the VA entitlement program works. But guess what? We moved around in Latin America with my dad doing inter-development contracts. So I knew that world really, really well. So it was like when I was in the car with the parents and the kids, I was that kid. Like that was my childhood and it was very normal for me. And so I could even talk to the kids in middle school and high school and be like, I remember when I was in seventh grade and we came from Colombia and I went through the exact same thing you are, and I could build that rapport. And by the way, that's leaning into who you are, right? Like figure out what language is unique to you. Like if you're a first-time homebuyer, you should work with first-time homebuyers, right? Like if you're downsizing and relocating, you can speak a very specific language that gives you authority and authenticity in the process.
So I know that you tied to that answer that you just gave me. One of your mentors, I remember you have said before, sat you down at 29 and told you bluntly, 'You're no longer a child prodigy. You're just an average successful guy. So go get good at something else.' And that pushed you towards economics, scaling and software. So the question is, from where you sit today, what's the first system they keep avoiding — like people who are doing 15 to 40 deals a year and they are the bottleneck basically in their own businesses? From where you sit today, what's the first system they keep avoiding to build?
