And please allow me to introduce the CEO of eXp Realty, Leo Perea, and the founder of eXp Realty himself, Glenn Sanford.
So, first I want to give a shout out to Samantha. That was amazing.
Oh, yeah. Yes. And I also got started at 19 years old. So I see a pattern for very successful estate agents and real estate agents who start early.
They do. They do. Yeah. So, of course, Adam mentioned me being geeky. I got my Meta glasses and I'm actually recording you. And I got my Limitless pendant. So if you've ever heard of that, I'm actually recording you as well, and our conversation. So anyway, I'm kind of geeking out up here.
I was expecting Adam to say I'm also a nerd. So we're the revenge of the nerds is how we've been introduced at other conferences. Glenn and I just finished a tour in the US. There was about 19 cities, two and a half weeks. Well, it stretched a little bit. Wendy did the last one. And I think whoever spent time with Glenn and I, to say it nicely, we were trying to pass our anxiety on to you. So, we're going to scare the [__] out of you for the next couple minutes. Is that okay?
My past life prior to joining eXp, I started and scaled a software company that got to 80% market share in the United States. I sold it. I was mostly spear fishing when he called me and asked me to come play with you guys. I thought I was done with real estate. I wanted to go into tech and finance. And then Glenn showed me the platform and I truly believe this is the most unique opportunity in real estate. Super exciting what Adam shared about where we are at in the UK. But just so you guys know, Glenn and I see global international as the future of this company. We want to be in 100 countries. We said on our earnings call 50,000 agents by 2025 in 50 countries, but I'm telling you I want to go to 100. So what I do tell Wall Street and anybody else who asks, I don't care when this is about partnering with the best real estate entrepreneurs on the planet, I've boiled down to what I describe the company in about 11 words, which is a platform that allows entrepreneurs to build whatever size dream they want. Right? It doesn't matter if you want to be number one, you want to build the biggest revshare group, or you just want a business that provides for the lifestyle that you want. It's all about understanding who you want to be and how you want to get there. But I'll pass it along to Glenn because I would say about 18 months. When did you first take us to go see Peter Diamandis? Was that two years ago now?
Two. Yeah, about two years ago. Yeah.
So, two years ago, Glenn said, 'Get to Southern California and come spend a day with me.' And I met Peter Diamandis, which is where you were just for the last week. So, I'm going to hand it on to you. So, you tell them where you were and why we want to transfer our anxiety to them.
Yeah. So, maybe I'll start it this way. How many of you have like a business mentor, confidant, somebody you can actually ask questions of the business? Okay. And keep your hands up if that business confidant is ChatGPT. Okay. And raise your hands if you are talking to ChatGPT all the time. Okay, that's good. It's a good room. The reality is that I spend probably more time talking to ChatGPT than I spend time talking to people. And not that I don't like people, but ChatGPT is like my nonjudgmental thought partner that I can bounce crazy ideas off of. But going back, I think it was actually March of 2023. How many of you are familiar with Peter Diamandis? Anybody in the room know that name? Okay. So he's partnered with Tony Robbins on some stuff. He started an organization called XPRIZE back in 2009 which was a prize for the first reusable spacecraft that went to outer space. And there was a $10 million prize. A bunch of people competed. It became Virgin Galactic. XPRIZE has done a bunch of other things. They've got the carbon removal XPRIZE where Elon Musk put $100 million up for carbon removal. And actually this last week was the XPRIZE adventure trip. So, I'm on the XPRIZE vision circle board. Basically, I give them money every year and every year do this trip. And so, one of them was, a company we saw this last week was removing carbon from the atmosphere. But he's also really big on AI. And so, back March of 2023, he brought a number of people to his event in LA called Abundance 360. And the amount of stuff that was going on in AI was just crazy. We'd been talking about it for a number of years prior about how things were going to change. And it was that point when I recognized that the world was changing right now. And of course, we had seen ChatGPT 3 or 3.5 had shown up, but we all went to LA. We had about 27 of us. And we started to really think about what AI was going to fundamentally do to our businesses. And so I've been heads down quite frankly for the last year. I think July last year I heads down working actually with the international team and we've been, I guess I can use this word because I heard Adam use it earlier, we AI-ed the [__] out of it. And meaning that we started to record all of our meetings that take place in international and we started to actually start to organize a lot of things. And then this year, 2025, we saw really the biggest shifts in AI that we've ever seen. In fact, literally every single week we're seeing another drop of another technology that takes the game just another level forward. I think last week was OpenAI's ChatGPT o3 Pro. And I don't expect that most of you have played with all of these models, but these are really, really smart models. Like these literally have sort of thinking qualities that with a good human, you all being good humans, can brainstorm with the smartest thought partners that you could possibly have. Now, the AIs themselves are dumb as a doornail, but with a smart human asking them good questions, they can actually get really, really useful really, really quick. So we, and I think here, what about two months ago you went to an event?
Two months ago, Leo calls me and he goes, he had his 'oh [__]' moment. I'm only using that because I heard Adam say it earlier.
That's literally how I started the call.
I said, 'Are you awake yet?' And he said, 'Why?' I was like, 'I have an 'oh [__]' moment conversation with you.'
And so after that it was like we have been like thinking about every single way that AI is going to disrupt everything. But the flip side of it is it's actually almost similar to, you know, how social media is today. Those who lean in are going to get their unfair share of the market because like anything else, those who use the technology first end up getting advantages that the others don't. So, that's kind of...
Yeah. And I'll unpack what that moment was for me. So, I read a lot. I try to stay as aware as possible and again I very much concede that this gentleman is ahead of me on a lot of things and then normally it takes me a little bit of time to catch up with the anxiety level but I was on a call and I noticed how many public company CEOs had sent out emails. So I don't know if you've kept track of this but probably over the last 60 days the CEO of Shopify, the CEO of Fiverr, I mean global footprint companies have all sent emails saying we are no longer hiring. We're going to retrofit everything we do and we're going to try with AI before we add headcount. And I've been licensed since the year 2002 in the states. I've lived through two giant tech leap forwards. One was high-speed internet. That's how long I've been doing this. So once upon a time I had to drive to the office just to get internet in order to print out the listings, call the sellers, call the buyers, schedule appointments. And when high-speed internet came to the house, I was able to do more with less, right? You could sell a home faster. So in the United States in 2002, the fastest I could sell a home was like 3 weeks, right? Because it would go into this portal. I would look it up. I hit print. I'd leave a voicemail on a landline. They'd call me back. I'd schedule a showing. Now we can sell them in hours, right? Because it goes through a syndicated portal. They can schedule appointment digitally. They can send me the contract digitally. But the second giant leap forward was the one that Glenn once told me was how eXp was born was high-speed internet combined with mobile. Right? So once we were able to have this as the remote control of our world is what gave birth to eXp but it also gave birth to the speed at which transactions happen in the United States. In 2002, the highest producing team in the country was probably selling 300 homes. In 2010, I was number one in the world at Keller Williams as a team leader and number five in the Wall Street Journal across the United States and I sold 600 homes in 2012. And this is a really interesting number that I figured out for a presentation last week. So in 2010 when I was number one in the world at Keller in the United States, there was 4 million total transactions in all of the US. Very bad time for us. Financial crisis. 2024 was also 4 million transactions. So identical years. If I would have been at eXp in the US with the same amount of transactions that I was in 2010, I would have been number 17 at eXp and number 77 in the United States. Same number of transactions. So what's happening is the people who are leveraging technology are getting faster, stronger, better. And every other leap I've seen in technology augmented my strengths only. So, one of the things I've always preached about is find your God-given talent and lean in. Right? The educational system, in my opinion, is broken because I'm told as a little kid to work on my weaknesses and if I pay someone to do my homework, it's cheating. But as an adult, it's I'm a very good entrepreneur. But I've never gotten anything that made me better at my weaknesses, right? Everything like high-speed internet and digital allows me to be in relationship. Like there I see a lot of faces that I interact with on LinkedIn and Instagram, right? Raise your hand if I've actually messaged you or commented on your posts. I see a couple. And so I'm in a digital relationship with 80,000 people which you know in the 80s and 90s when real estate franchises were developed in the US that were exported, we weren't able to have that one-to-one relationship. But ChatGPT is different and AI because I actually now can augment my weaknesses. So my analogy is that the evolution of AI is going to make you super human if you choose to engage with it. So for example, I was a child in the 80s, so I was not diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure I'm ADD with ADHD and probably some dyslexia in there. If you've ever gotten a text message from me, that'll make a lot of sense. And I'm a very good oral communicator with a very good memory because I think those were adaptations of me as a child. I couldn't pay attention in class. So if I sat quietly in the front of the room, I could absorb it. And I don't think I've read a book since high school. So now I just consume everything through Audible. This gentleman is drafting a book. It's really good. And he sent me the manuscript and I looked at it and I was like, there's no way I'm actually going to be able to read this. And that is a perfect example where that was the limitation I had. But I used ElevenLabs and I converted it into audio of his own voice without him knowing. And I cloned his voice and I listened to it at 2x because that's the way my brain consumes information on a weekend while working out and I sent it to him. So, we've now unlocked human potential that literally until last year I didn't have access to, right? So, now I can actually write and post stuff to LinkedIn without having Wendy review it for me because I now have someone who knows my voice, my tone. And so to Glenn's point of social, we are at social media when we had MySpace. Let that sink in. Like to Samantha's story of how she's leveraged social. How fun would it be to know that we were that Instagram and Facebook were coming. Like that's my bet. We haven't even seen the scale platforms that win, right? Right. I just saw a headline that Zuck committed $15 billion to try to take OpenAI's number one place by recruiting someone. The amount of stuff that hasn't shown up yet, it's remarkable. So, and then the one last thesis and I'll pass it back to Glenn here that I am excited and should make you excited is I think we're well, first of all, there's a statement that I live by and it's marketers ruin everything.
Marketers ruin everything because what the goal of marketing or business is is to find an outside return on effort whether it's dollars, time, an email campaign where you do an activity and you get this very large return on it and then we all find out about it then we all do it and then we diminish it. Make sense? So my prediction is that over the next 6, 12, 18 months, you're all going to become digital communicators at scale, whether it's written, video, voice. If, do you guys, who of you follow me on Instagram? Do you guys see I just launched a new podcast and the first podcast is the two of us, go listen to it. It's really fun. But that entire, if you pull it up on Instagram, go to my account and you listen to it, that is not me. That is AI that the team cloned my voice, wrote it in my voice. We have a ChatGPT of Leo. We have a digital twin of Glenn. We have a ChatGPT of Leo that has everything I've ever said on the internet. And the marketing team can take what they've wrote and said, 'Make it sound like Leo.' And so what's about to happen is we're about to commoditize all forms of digital communication. Right? So I'm sure like I know you guys like LinkedIn. I see you very active on it. Have you, by show of hands, have you noticed someone who was probably not very good at speaking and is now William Shakespeare, right? And you know, the clues are the emojis and the dashes, right? So, everyone's about to do that. And humans at scale are average. And what that means is you're about to see a whole bunch of average AI content because people are going to do average prompts and you're going to get average content. And so what's going to happen is it's going to go the way of the banner ad or email, right? Remember 1999, if you're old enough, how exciting it was to get an email? Tom Hanks made a movie about it because it was so good. When's the last time you checked your email, Glenn?
We don't check email anymore, right? And so what my bet is and the exciting part in this moment is to actually double down on human experience. I believe over the next 12, 18, 24 months, people are going to crave human interaction that's authentic and real because so many people are just going to start using AI to communicate. And so I think the people who can deliver the best human experience in any business will win. Whether we want to call it real estate or estate agency, you're in the human business. That's the business that you're in. You're guiding people home through the most expensive, emotional, and infrequent transaction of their life.
So, one thing, how many of you think you, how many believe you're in sales? One. And how many people think they're in marketing? So, if those who are in sales, hands up. Marketing, hands up. Okay. So, you know, the reality is we're in the marketing business that happens to get monetized through sales. I mean, that's what Samantha's presentation really showed is that she is a master marketer. She created tons of inbound traffic. One of the other things that we, and I'm going to talk about a couple things that you can do today. But how many of you as marketers know that the most important thing is speed to lead? Meaning the speed at which you return an email or a phone call? Everybody, right? So, how many of you are at least cappers or above in the room? Okay, so we got a good room. So one of the things that we did this last year, by the way, it's a UK company. There's a company called Fyxer. F-Y-X. They're based out of London. I discovered them last year around October-ish and I ended up using their platform. eXp is now actually a shareholder. You're actually a shareholder in Fyxer. But if you're a capper or above, you can actually get a platform that will actually increase your speed to lead dramatically by sorting your email. And you can actually go to expai.exprealty.com and you can actually install it on your Gmail or your MSN and actually get a huge increase. In fact, you've got like an example.
I got a real story if you...
So we were in Houston or I was in Houston. He was in another part of the country. We tried to divide and conquer. You got us both. So true story. I was in Houston, Texas. Brandon Schneider came and grabbed me before I went on stage. I was about to go on an AI rant and he said, 'Let me give you a real story.' So, Fyxer AI is something and I have it embedded in not only our work email, I have it in my personal email, too, because that was overwhelming. But an agent came up to me and said, 'This happened last week.' First of all, the consumer went to ChatGPT to search, not Google. The prompt was, 'Who is the most investor-friendly agent in Houston?' That was the exact question posed to ChatGPT. ChatGPT responded with Brandon Schneider of eXp. Here's his email. So, first let's pause right there in the story. You will never search in Google within 36 months. Do you guys comprehend that? Right. Everything is going to contextual large language model conversation. Whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, whomever wins that we don't know their name yet. So, one of the first homework assignments is go ask ChatGPT the prompt you'd expect a consumer to type in for your name and pop up. Right? Raise your hand if you're really good at SEO. Raise them high. Right? SEO is about to die. So, you need to go talk to large language models and ask it because the beautiful part is for SEO you had to pay someone a course. And actually, he wrote a really good article. I just read that one about courses dying. Go to his, it's Facebook. Was it on LinkedIn or Facebook?
