And welcome to the 2025 Vision call, Zoom, whatever you want to call it. We are glad to be here with you. Man, I just want to say goodbye 2024. Good, bad, love it, leave it, whatever it was for you, goodbye. That's in your rearview mirror. Today we're here to talk about the future. We're here to talk about the year ahead and the years ahead. And with me are some of my favorite people on the planet. We have, of course, founder, commander-in-chief Glenn Sanford. Glenn, welcome. Good to have you here today.
Hey Brent, great to be here. It is going to be an amazing 2025.
As you know as well as anybody, I still can picture you with your headset washing dishes listening to Zig Ziglar. But what do you make of 2025?
There you go. Over the top is what takes place inside of this range. Everything else out there is an illusion. Everything that's real is right in here. So make what you want for 2025 real right here, and everything else will take care of itself.
I love it. Well said. And by the way, Glenn is referencing not last week at my dishwasher job, but when I was in college at 19 when I used to listen to Zig Ziglar. So want to make sure, although my wife makes me do the dishes all the time and I volunteer some of the time. So we're on there. Also CEO, our extraordinary leader, and man, we're so lucky to have Leo Pareja running at the helm of eXp along with Glenn. Leo, welcome to the 2025 Vision Zoom. We're glad you're here.
Good morning, good afternoon. I am so fired up. I was just on the phone with one of our top agents and they were asking me what I was thinking about. I said I just can't wait to get up in the morning. Outside of macroeconomic stuff, I think we are the best positioned to crush it in 2025. We've had three lean years as an industry and the cream rose to the top. Agents got more productive, the ones that made it survived. We learned to do more with less. Agents looked through their budget, figured out what they needed to do, do not do. And at the end of the day, this is just about serving families making the biggest decision of their financial life. So I am fired up. I woke up the other day at 2:00 in the morning and wrote down a whole bunch of stuff and started blowing up Wendy and Amy and everybody else. So I'm ready to get on the field on Monday morning.
Good. I won't feel bad about texting you at 2:00 AM anymore. All right, Leo, amazing, love it. And of course we have the one and only from the East Coast and one of the most special human beings on the planet, Tina Cole. Tina, welcome to the Zoom. We're glad you're on.
Oh, I am so thankful to be here. Of all the amazing humans at our company, and we have a lot of them, I'm just honored that you guys wanted me on here. So I'm excited. I'm excited for 2025. Goodbye 2024.
You are wanted along with everybody else on the Zoom and the people that watch us on replay. Man, we could not be more excited. So let's jump into it. By the way, I hope you did the basics. My wife and I drove back from Tahoe through the Sierras yesterday morning and we sat there just crystallizing our goals and dreams for 2025. Two pages. Yes, it's not typed up. Yes, it's laminated because you need to see it in your own handwriting and read it. And we are after it. I hope you guys have all done it. If you haven't, take a moment, get away with a cup of coffee for two or three hours and decide what your future will be because you're either going to build your future or someone will hire you to build theirs. So you might as well build your own. With that, let's get going. Let's go to Glenn, the man who started this all back in 2009. He was not washing dishes, but he was at his laptop going, 'How can I create a better way?' He's seen so many markets come and go. He's like me, have been in real estate since early 90s, and this is our third market correction, right Glenn? So hey, jump in, comment, love to hear what you think about our current market and where we're headed. The floor is yours.
Yeah, no, thanks Brent. And great seeing Leo and Tina. And you know, one, I'm super glad that you mentioned working on your plan. I mean, this is the beginning of the year. If you haven't taken the time, make sure you work on your plan so that you can work your plan during the year. Because if you don't have a plan, it's sort of like the Wizard of Oz. It doesn't really matter where you go because you don't actually know where you're going. But if you know where you're going, it becomes a heck of a lot easier to get there. So you know, this is the beginning of the year, we talk about goal setting, but start to work on your plan. You can iterate on it as you go, but at least have one to start with. And then you know, at the end of the quarter, at the end of the next quarter after that, you can adjust and pivot and move forward. But if you operate without a plan, a lot of times that's where the frustration comes in. You know, we're saying goodbye to 2024. Well, if you had a plan in 2024 and you were iterating and operating against that plan, you probably didn't have a bad 2024 because you were actually operating in alignment with what was going on and you were being real about what was happening versus wanting something that didn't really exist. It's almost like I think about when I was showing homes back as an agent. I became an agent back in 2002 and I had people that would come into the market and they would have a preconceived idea of what a home would be that they would find to live in. And I had to educate them even before we went to look at homes and say, 'Hey, we're going to go look at homes, but I just want to let you know the home that you believe exists doesn't actually exist. What we have to do is get real with the market. And once we get real with the market, we can find the home that actually suits you and that you can do the things that you want to do with that home.' And I think that's the same thing with 2025. Get real about where you're at in your business in 2025 and you can actually have a perfect business in 2025. So you know, obviously there's lots of cycles. And what we do know is that virtually almost like clockwork every 7 to 10 years the market goes down and then the market comes back and then the market goes down and the market comes back. And what we want to do is to be in a position where we're gathering market share when the market's going down. Maybe our business actually increases, but maybe we face more adversity than we were used to. But we want to gather market share because at the end of grabbing market share, when the market pops back up, that's when you'll see all of your hard work rewarded with what takes place after that. So you know, one of the first things is just make sure that you work a plan. You think about what metrics you're measuring. And measuring, sometimes it's not net income. Sometimes it's number of families served. It's different metrics for different seasons. You know, we really have a lot of agents, and Leo and I see this all the time, and Brent you do, Tina you do, we have a lot of agents that are knocking it out of the park. So you know, there's a ton of people that are doing really, really well. One of the things we want to try to do, and what we think we do fairly well, is we want to make transparent what's working. And so you see things like iConversations, you see a lot of the things that we're doing, the podcast that Leo and I are doing and others are doing, the trainings that you guys are doing and all the other trainings that are going on out there. This is all highlighting the best of the best and modeling behaviors a lot of times helps create those results. But ultimately, you know, success favors effort, persistence, and focus. And so that's really what I think 2025 is all about. Obviously, with our leadership changes in the US, which obviously Leo leading the charge, that's given me time to focus on other parts of the business including places like international. And of course we're doing all the same stuff there that we're doing domestically. We're adding new countries, we're bringing in new agents, we're focusing on productive active agent count, we're doing all the different things and we're doing the business planning just like every agent anywhere in the world should be doing. And we're doing it on the parts of the business that we have the most influence over. And it's super exciting. You know, one of the things I was thinking about before I got on this call, you know that only one out of about 25 agents in the United States is an eXp agent. So I mention that because most agents are stuck in legacy models. They don't have the positive feedback loops that eXp has. The way that we're organized, the way that we think about compensation, the way we put agents first, the way all of our decisions are agent-centric first. They're not. As Leo and I talk about constantly, we're the most agent-centric real estate brokerage on the planet. We're not the most broker-owner friendly real estate brokerage on the planet. And I make that distinction because everything that we're doing is to help agents live better lives through the business of real estate. And everything we're doing, tools, technologies, compensation structure, all of that is designed to help you as an agent. And with that, it makes it easier to weather the downturns which do happen because of that extra support that's built right into the model. So you know, eXp is obviously a safe haven for you to build your business but also supports you in both the good times and the bad times. So anyway, lots of things going on. I'm going to leave it at that, but super stoked and thank you Brent and Tina for putting this call together.
Absolutely, man. We're so glad to have you and Leo on. I love what you said though about this market and where it is. I mean, we've seen this again and again and again. There's a pruning that happens, like a forest fire. The forest is healthier after the fire. You prune a tree, it grows back healthier, produces more fruit. I had a bunch of friends over this morning and we're in the sauna, we jumped in the pool which is like 40 degrees, we're in my spa that holds like... it was awesome. But we were talking about the market. One of them is a loan officer, he has 40 LOs working for him, very successful guy. And long story short, I said, 'Is it true I heard 75% of the LOs are not renewing this year?' They didn't renew. 75%. I go, 'But that's unverified, that's what I heard.' He says, 'No, no, no, that's incorrect. It's 77%.' Which means all the one, two, three loans they were doing for Grandma and Grandpa, aunts and uncles, sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, all that kind of stuff, they weren't really making a living but they're siphoning off business. 77% of those people will not be doing those loans, but all those loans will flow to the 23% that are left. And so same thing in real estate. Everybody's losing agents from every brokerage including eXp. And this is, and I'm not excited about it, but it's been three tough years. And when the going gets tough, the tough get going. But as it is, you know, we get pruned here, we're going to come back healthier. And all that business that was spread out so far, it's going to come to the last man, the last woman standing. It's that kind of a market. But I'm telling you what, man, I'm so excited for this year. I want to go to Tina real quick before we go to Leo. Tina had come up with some really cool insights. Tina, would you share with everyone kind of what you were thinking?
Yeah, so I don't know if you want... I have slides. I'm a nerd, I got really prepared. Do you want me to share them?
