Leo Pareja: Squashing misinformation in the real estate industry

Thank you for having me.

Absolutely.

Yeah, no, gladly. So I started as an agent at the age of 19. So I say I was born and raised into the industry. I lived through a boom and then a bust and then a recovery. So as a practitioner, as an agent, I've sold close to 4,000 homes, both retail, REO, hedge funds. So if it's happened in the last 16 years, I touched it. And I've seen massive shifts in both interest rates, supply, demand. And the thought and words I keep saying to our agents is this too shall pass. There are moments in history where we all have very emotional reactions, and the one thing I've learned across my decades in the industry is we can't control what happens, but we can control how we react to what happens. So there are some folks that are very upset, there's some folks that are excited, but the reality is if these are the new rules of engagement, and I say if because the judge needs to ratify, the DOJ needs to opine, but if these are the rules that we're going to unpack today, we can only move forward to serve customers in the most important transaction of their life.

Yeah, so again, each chapter of my career led me to the next one. So after the financial crisis, I actually started a pretty large private lending fund, and based on the shifts of Dodd-Frank and CFPB, I adapted quickly. And as I started building that business, I needed public record data, which then led me to the next chapter in the tech business. And after I exited those businesses, I got a call from Glenn Sanford to join the executive ranks. I had actually made the mental decision to probably get out of organized real estate. Building the tech symphony was the hardest thing I've ever done for many, many reasons. But when I understood the model and the opportunity, I got excited to stay in organized real estate.

Yeah, so we all found out on Friday, March 15th, and we can almost set that as the before and after date. Again, it has not been ratified by the judge, and the DOJ could still opine, but the targeted date for implementation is mid-July. And the first things to make sure is who does it affect. So it's more who it doesn't cover, which are the HomeServices of America agents and brokers. But outside of that, every licensed individual dues-paying member of NAR, including all my agents, including the other 94 independents that were not covered per the release. The agents themselves are released, but even like ours, we're still currently litigating and I can't comment on ongoing litigation, but the agents themselves are now released on the seller liability.

Yeah, I think that's the very confusing portion of time we're in. Even though there is an implementation date of mid-July, per the Real Trends report that came out last week, we're the single largest broker in units sold. So we serve more families than any other brokerage in America. And so I feel like we have a very large megaphone of feedback loop. And so immediately on Saturday, the day after, I was getting calls and emails and text messages from our agents telling us that consumers were already saying, well, I don't want to offer a buy-side commission, I don't want to pay you. What does this mean? So there's a lot of confusion in there, and I fully expect that there's going to be consumer questions or demands for behavior to begin prior to mid-July.

Absolutely. That's a great way to start, Clayton. So prior to 3/15, before there was any news, by participating in an MLS, you agreed to business rules. That's the benefit of an MLS. And most MLSs had the offer of compensation and cooperation as part of that. I say most because there were some very notable examples where rules had been in place where you could put that all the way down to zero or one. But for the ones that had it, and let's say there was an offer of 2%, 2.5%, 3%, whatever it may be, that was a guaranteed offer of compensation, a unilateral offer of compensation. If that transaction paid out, that commission was due. And if there was even a commission dispute, those two agents would go to the board for arbitration to mediate that. And by participating in offering it, it was not to be negotiated or touched or messed with outside of, you know, the ACC credit or something of that sort that was agreed upon by the parties. So once a commission is listed in the MLS, there's not a negotiation between the listing agent and the buyer agent.

Correct. And that's actually probably the biggest headline that I've seen that isn't being captured. There has always been choice, there has always been room to negotiate. On the listing side, there is a variety of business models from a flat fee to percentage-based to limited service. So that's always been there. What I was referencing is once the seller and listing agent agreed upon what was being offered as the co-op fee, once it was signed into the agreement and offered in the MLS, after the fact, once the offer was delivered to the listing agent and seller, you couldn't change those terms. So there was never going to be a at-the-closing-table discussion of buyer representation and seller representation saying, you didn't really do much work on this transaction, you're going to take one and a half instead of two and a half.

That covers it. So there was, and in most MLSs right now, that offer of unilateral offer of compensation is still present. So that transition hasn't happened yet. We haven't made any drastic changes in the last 11 days since this. When we woke up Monday morning on the 18th, all the inventory in most MLSs still had whatever had been offered. And that's a really important point because if you follow some of the rhetoric and commentary out there, there are people who expected immediate change when that settlement was announced, and that has not happened and has not been decided yet.

No, that's a great question. And again, back to our scale, one of the things we were able to operationalize within a week was a full buyer kit. And what that buyer kit has for our agents is, we've had a seller agenda as of Q4 of last year where it very specifically and directly highlights to sellers that all buyer commissions are fully negotiable. So whatever full commission you expected and we're going to offer as a buyer co-op, it could be zero. And there are markets in this country where we've seen that, where the supply-demand afforded it and people were offering zero or one or one and a half percent. So no standard fees. But what we rolled out within a week was a script and an FAQ for both sellers and buyers, and then an FAQ for buyers as to what this will mean in purgatory, as you put it, and then post-July 15th.

So again, I'm very pragmatic. My background, I always rely on data. And what the top MLSs consistently put out from a data perspective is that agents never sort by commission paid. And this is, again, you don't have to take my word for it. We have the software and the search history at scale for MLSs. Agents do not sort by co-op offered. They search by the requirements that the consumer has: three-bedroom, two-bath, price point. But you and I met during the financial crisis. There was a time and period where there was 18 months of inventory, and we had sellers offering 4% and 5% commissions to try to get as much attention as possible. I've always viewed the buyer co-op as demand gen. It's a marketing fee. We have 1.6 million people who do a noble profession in the housing industry, and these people invest months and thousands of dollars out of their own pocket before earning any compensation for it. So to say that it isn't necessary or this is some cost, I truly don't believe that. The offer of compensation, in my opinion, is demand gen lead that the buyer or the seller and the listing agent are offering to market that property.

Yeah, I think education, education, education is unpacking any misinformation that they have consumed. Because again, thanks to phones and the internet, where everyone's an expert and anyone can be a talking head on TikTok or Instagram, so I would be setting the baseline with consumers, buyers or sellers: what do you think this means? What does this actually mean to you? And how does this affect our game plan?

No, so one thing that we internalize as a brokerage is we are a platform to empower these very ambitious entrepreneurs who are all independent contractors. And I have the deepest respect for what it takes to be an entrepreneur, since I've been one my whole life. So as I see it, my job is to lead from the front with education and answer as many questions as possible. And I'm not encouraging people to be quiet. I think we need to have conversations. I think agents should reach out to their peers in their local market across brands, go have coffee. The amount of insecurity and fear is palpable. And I think one of the ways to overcome that is just go grab coffee with an agent that you did a deal with, ask each other questions, share knowledge, because the reality is we're all 11 days in with the information provided to us. As we've seen in other settlements, whether in our industry or outside of our industry, when it gets closer to the date, there's additional information, of course, there's amendments, there's updates. So we don't have all the rules of engagement yet. The one thing I'll say from my two decades in real estate, when there is a shift, there's also unintended consequences that you and I haven't thought of. We don't know what we don't know. And so there's going to be a lot more learning to be done by all of us.

I truly believe the agent is at the center of the universe. That's our entire ethos as a company. So I'm here with our entire leadership team to, in real time, get feedback. For the agents watching, you guys know how to get a hold of me, you're not shy. So when you come across a problem, we can unpack that and operationalize it, then we share company-wide as soon as possible.

Yeah, no, that's a very good question. So the sentence I'm saying to all of our agents, and kind of the mantra regarding the NAR settlement, is treat your buyers like you treat your sellers. So I actually don't think that we need to imagine what this looks like out of thin air. I think we need to take whatever processes they already do and have done for decades with sellers, and just now look at buyers through that same lens. So in a listing, in most markets, it is a competitive process where a seller is interviewing two or three listing agents. It's a best practice. And there could be varieties of cost based on the options of service. We have a low fee, a flat fee, a full service with high-end video and white glove service. And there is no listing that currently goes into an MLS that's not in writing. And that's a listing agreement that ultimately needs to happen before a home is listed on the listing side. And inside of that listing, we have the buyer cooperation compensation. But as for the example that I'm using, and again, not all 50 states, and you and I both probably got a lot of hate mail this week because a sentence can get taken out of place, is some states have agency disclosure, but only a handful of states have representation requirements, because that is an offer of employment versus an agency disclosure. So states like Washington, North Carolina, and Georgia have had rules where the agency covered compensation. But in the vast majority of states, the buyer representation relationship is mostly implied, meaning if it's convenient, I'll unlock that door at the open house, very low commitment, let's just meet there and see how the relationship unfolds. But that resulted in low commitment from both sides. So a home buyer might date multiple agents at the same time and ask someone to see a certain house and someone else to see another one, with agents kind of having the same not formal relationship.

Correct. Okay, yeah. So again, back to the question, as we interpret the NAR rules, part of the rules change is that we want the buyer agent and the buyer to have the same level of finite relationship that we see between listing agents and sellers.

And just to take that further, on the listing side you have exclusive representation and there's also open representation. So I fully expect to see more than one flavor on the buyer side where you could have a low commitment, show me that one property one time for X fee, but there is no long-term commitment. I fully expect to see some agents offer an open representation where it's like, if I help you with that property, I'm owed compensation, but that doesn't mean that it applies to any property. And then we'll see the exclusive representation, which is what most of us are familiar with on the buy side. And again, I'm not making this up out of thin air. I'm just looking at what exists for sellers today and the different types of relationships.

I think what we will see is going to be market specific. And I mean by like low inventory versus high inventory versus price point. So not just like North Carolina is North Carolina all markets. It might shift by where supply and demand goes, whether Altos Research is saying it's a buyer's market or a seller's market. And one of the wonderful things that I get to interact with, we have agents that do all types of different business models: high volume, low fee, fixed fee versus percentage-based versus white glove service. And I fully expect the awesome entrepreneurs I'm in business with to be leading the charge and experimenting. Whenever you see a shift in any industry or business segment, or there's an emergence of a new opportunity, in capitalism we see an explosion of people trying stuff. Go back to the railroads, there was like 100 plus of them, and then in a few years there's kind of the tried and true survivors of the experiment. So my guess, I reserve the right to change my mind since this is recorded, but we'll probably see a bunch of folks try things, and then water always finds the lowest point of gravity. Whatever is the best thing for the consumer and the practitioner pursues the consumer's needs will probably win. And my expectation is to see two, three, four different models that the brokers of the future will support based on what capitalism decides as the new way of doing things.

Yeah, so again, going back to my sentence, it goes the same way. I think agents, whether they're new or seasoned, are very good at articulating the value they deliver to a seller. And I just don't think that most of them have consciously developed that script, that presentation, that muscle to articulate value again. I was born and raised in this industry professionally, and so I'm quite confident that the expert guides that they are, they will figure it out rather quickly. But it's going to be a combination. NAR has a great document with the 105 things buyer agents do in a transaction. And most of us take for granted what we do every day because we do it in our sleep. But it's our job as professionals to be able to articulate that, to explain that, to put a dollar to it. And I would also encourage them to be flexible and test new models to support consumer demand.

So again, time will tell. My guess will be that the agent of the future can actually have multiple offerings even in their own practice. You do not want to turn away a consumer that's highly educated, maybe has a financial background, has purchased two or three homes, maybe needing less services than a first-time home buyer who's doing FHA and getting a down payment assistance program from the county. I don't see that it'd be wise for an agent to cut themselves off to a section of the market if there's demand that works. I know this market pretty well and fairly financially sophisticated and done it a few times, but I'm certain the agents that I've worked with have earned that key. So I think sometimes your more experienced buyers end up being some of the most high maintenance and high need buyers. I relocated from the Northern Virginia area to Miami where I now live. I'm still licensed in Virginia, I still hire an agent to sell my stuff for a myriad of reasons. I don't want to speak to the buyer and create any misrepresentation. I want that buffer of representation where we're not creating more potential legal liability.

So great point. So just to say black and white, mid-July we expect the offer of compensation field to be deleted, and we expect either through comments or a field in the MLS for a seller, if they so choose, inside of their listing agreement to make an offer of concession. And a couple things to really unpack there. One, a seller concession could be used for any myriad of reasons: buy down points in this interest rate environment, pay closing costs, pay for an HVAC repair, or for the offer of compensation via the buyer agreement. So I would expect to see seller agrees to pay X to eXp Realty. And so how that gets worked into the settlement statement, but the most important thing people need to take away from this, if this is the only thing that they take away from this conversation, is that that is no longer a unilateral offer of compensation. So I'll give an example. If a $500,000 listing today has a 3% buyer co-op, that is due upon closing whether it sells for...

Exactly. And that's the fundamental shift. It moves from a unilateral offer of compensation to a negotiated term between the parties. And that's going to require a lot more upfront conversation and documentation.

First and foremost, a buyer representation agreement. That's the most critical piece. It needs to clearly outline the services being provided, the compensation structure, and how that compensation will be paid. Whether it's a flat fee, a percentage, or an hourly rate, it needs to be in writing and agreed upon before any showings occur. Second, agents need to have a clear conversation with sellers about what they're willing to offer in terms of concessions. That should be part of the listing agreement discussion. And third, agents need to be prepared to have the value conversation with both buyers and sellers. They need to be able to articulate why their services are worth the fee they're charging.

Practice. Role play with your colleagues. Use the scripts and FAQs that we've provided at eXp. And remember, you are a professional. You provide immense value in one of the most important transactions of a person's life. Don't be afraid to talk about that value. And also, be flexible. Not every client is going to need the same level of service. Be prepared to offer different service levels at different price points. The key is to have the conversation early and often, so there are no surprises at the closing table.

Just that this is a moment of change, but change brings opportunity. The agents and brokers who embrace this change, who educate themselves and their clients, and who are willing to adapt their business models, will thrive. The industry has been through disruptions before, and it will come out stronger on the other side. Thank you for having me, Clayton.

So post mid-July, there's a $500,000 listing. The seller chooses to offer a $15,000 seller concession in the MLS as advertised. If the buyer's agent does not put that into the contract in black and white and it's agreed upon by all parties, there is nothing they can do about it. Think of it more as a fixture in a contract. Today, there is a listing advertised fixtures convey, no matter if they are put into the contract, like the toilets and the showers, but if the washer and dryer or the stove are not explicitly written into the contract, the day of settlement you can show up and they're missing. There are lots of oral agreements across these 50 states that are enforceable. We have a statute called statutes of fraud specifically for real estate that if it's not in black and white, it does not matter what the agreement was. So think of this as a flooring credit, an HB credit, any form of credit that we currently are used to in a customary scene in real estate. Just think about it: we see offers of inducement for a behavior in commerce across, you know, come buy this car on the July 4th week and 0% financing. That now needs to be worked into the deal. So back to the example of $500,000, if someone lowballs at $450,000 or $425,000, that seller may say, okay, I'll accept that price, but I may not be offering that credit anymore. Understood.

The one stat I do know definitively, the largest MLSs in the country for the last six months, I called them and said what percentage of transactions have seller concessions? It's north of 50%. So that's north of 50% in the actual transaction, but not always disclosed at time of listing. So if there's going to be a concession that may be used for compensation, and there's a field in the MLS, we might expect more concessions being worked into the listing agreement so that transparency is there from the very beginning. And some headlines say they expect to see price drops, which I don't at all, but if a property was advertised at X and someone counters by increasing the purchase price by Y, that's how it could be worked in.

Yeah, so post-3/15 we refer to it going forward. Again, I'm not saying it as absolutes because I will get some messages from you guys saying no, I always got buyer representation on the whole, very large percentages. The relationship was somewhat implied, meaning it was not formalized through a buyer representation agreement. That stops. We have to have that spelled out just like we do with listings. So I would implore every agent who is a little confused or stressed to just say, what do I do for a seller? I set an appointment. I'm very often in a multiple competitor situation where you have to defend your value through either service, price, or experience, and execute an agreement between the parties where you defend your cost to the value you deliver. Again, I'm being very clear that that could be across a very large scale: lower fee, less services rendered, which is completely okay depending on the customer you're serving; higher service, white glove, full service, will probably have a higher price tag to it. We'll probably see people try a whole bunch in between. But what I think changes is the implied ambiguity, because that was covered by the offer of compensation, which now has to be spelled out in the contract.

No, again, it has to be negotiated because there's no absolute guarantee. So the buyer could request a closing credit if it's advertised. What I'm just being very clear about, and where we're very black and white when researching and speaking to counsel, is that they don't want it open to interpretation anymore.

Correct. The ruling states that the agent can only receive what's negotiated with the buyer, whether it's a seller concession, so it could come from multiple different places: a concession, from the listing agent who had negotiated compensation in their agreement, or from the home buyer. But ultimately, the agent gets paid what is agreed upon. And another footnote, just since we're on the subject, agents were never allowed to say that the buyer agent service was free. There are a lot of rules at the state levels about that, but I think loosely it was implied by some agents in their marketing, like 'oh, you don't have any out-of-pocket expenses.' They might not have said 'my service is free' because it's not, but the implied relationship was 'I'll take care of you and you don't have to write a check out of your side of it.' So one of the rulings in the settlements says if an agent says 'my service is free,' they are not allowed to receive any compensation from any party in the transaction. If that's the representation, that's what needs to take place.

The thing that I want to always remind people of is that if we look back over a 30-year history, 4 million is the low side of transactions that happen in any given year and 7 million is the high side. It is driven by human condition. None of us decide to move because rates are good; we decide to move because we need more space, because we need more humans, those humans move out, death, divorce, and a change of job. So the transactions will be there, and I fully believe that. Statistically, at a very high percentage rate, consumers choose representation today. There are a bunch of different ways to sell a home without an agent, including the proliferation of institutional buyers, iBuyers, do-it-yourself websites, all that is part of the ecosystem. But at a very high percentage rate, and we've actually seen it increase over the last couple years in the data, consumers still choose representation. Maybe it's the optimist entrepreneur in me who has been in agent lives, I think that we will professionalize the industry, and I think that the ones who choose to use the new rules of engagement will succeed. To guess what the population breakdown of the agent count is, I think it's a little early to tell. But we've always had Pareto's law in an extreme example, where a small percentage of the agents do a disproportionate amount of the business. I think the ones who just see the new rules of engagement and shift, like you said during the financial crisis if I chose not to do foreclosures and short sales, I didn't have a business. There were markets where it was 1% of the market and they didn't have to worry about it, but I served a market where it was double-digit percentages, and if I wanted to stay in business, I had to do it for a couple of years until the market healed. I don't think this is a short-term situation we're dealing with. We're dealing with new rules of engagement, and I spend little time worrying about whether I agree with it or not. If this is an edict contractually with the way we operate, I'm not going to spend any time worried about my feelings about it. What are the rules of engagement? Because it's my job to provide a service to American families who move every year and make the largest decision of their financial lives.

I would say both consumers and agents are seeing the same misinformation at headlines. You want to start the media side. 'The 6% commission is officially dead.' Well, first of all, there was no official anything. It's always been negotiable. 'Buyer agents are going away' is another headline I read. Commissions were always negotiable. There was no implied or mandated ways of doing the business. So I think everybody just needs to stop, read what's being said, and then compare it to the information they're receiving from their broker or their local association. In the last 11 days, we've seen a very nimble industry react and say, 'okay, let's unpack that.' There's a lot of confusion, there are a lot of folks who are paralyzed, but I'm witnessing folks across the space step up and be leaders and figure out a path forward because regardless of what our industry is doing, we serve homeowners in a very important process in their life.

That's a good one. I saw a headline that says prices are going to drop dramatically and affordability is coming back. That can be further from the truth. The price of homes is a math problem based on inventory and affordability, and commission plays no part in that. In the total cost of a transaction, it is a very small percent. So I think that's factually incorrect, and that's part of the education that consumers need or agents need to pass down to their consumers. Just because of this pivot in the way we interact with each other as agents, I think has no bearing on the cost of ownership.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. I use instead of demographics, I call it 'household formation,' but I use the same formula. And back to the human condition: when people make a decision they have to move, based on supply, demand, and cost of capital, they decide to buy or rent. But the human need to move: if your wife is pregnant and you live in a one-bedroom, you're going to figure out how to get into that two-bedroom. So the affordability portion is what affects that. But that's probably the biggest headline I've seen that I just shake my head at and say I don't even understand how they're coming up with this.

In my time in the industry, I feel like whenever there's a massive shift, it creates uncertainty. If we've been doing it this way for as long as we've all been in the space functionally, this is a pretty big shift. It's not like interest rates went up and we just have to figure out. Maybe I spent too much time on the mortgage side, but I'm like, oh, interest rates just shot up this is nothing. The rise from 3% to 8% was true chaos, and that is underplayed. That was the first time in American history where rates went up that fast and that quickly ever since we've had monetary policy. We survived that, and people still needed to buy and sell homes. Some agents couldn't thrive in it. The last year was a very hard year because we had a low watermark of 4 million transactions, which is 40% off years prior. In a way, I do not want to downplay the implication of this, and that's why I think you're referencing this palpable fear and chaos because it is meaningful change that none of us have operated under with at scale. So I think every agent and broker who has those feelings, they're real and they should not be dismissed. But in moments like this, I think you just need to make a decision: is this the profession I still want to participate in? Forget your opinions as to whether you agree or not. If these are the new rules of engagement, how do I articulate my value proposition to the consumer I serve and render my service?

Great question. I would advise any agent to look at their digital footprint and how they are received and communicate to the market. As a listing agent, we do really well at demonstrating performance: 'This is the portfolio of homes I've sold in this neighborhood, in this ZIP code, in this category, and this is why I'm the person you should choose.' New construction, investor grade, first-time home buyer, neighborhood expert — you articulate that very clearly through a presentation and through direct marketing to get to those folks. We're now going to be in a world where you're going to be able to say, 'Hey, I helped X amount of buyers last year. In a competitive situation, we didn't have to make 17 offers because I have expert negotiation experience, and this is the proof, the social proof.' I would be going back to every buyer that you still have a relationship with and getting a testimonial to your expert skill on the buy side and why someone should select you. Once we're in the new world, let's just say buyers read this misinformation and they say, 'Okay, I'm going to go at it a little,' and they get outbid two, three, four, five times, and they then choose a professional, and you do a great job for them because statistics say that most buyers are actually very satisfied with their agent experience. We probably haven't been as focused on getting that testimonial. So again, regearing your toolkit to articulate your value proposition and make it consumer-facing.

The number one question I received post-settlement in those initial 48 hours were from veterans. VA loans are very specific about what a consumer is allowed to pay for as a borrower. So two things: I expect to see the housing side, which is extremely nimble and already survived TRID and all the stuff that came post-financial crisis with Dodd-Frank, QM, and CFPB, I expect evolution to match the behavior. I don't actually know what that's going to look like tactically because it's 11 days in, but as an example, I could see FHA and VA coming up with language that's very specific to say, 'If the addendum says seller credit paid to you, that doesn't affect the amount of concessions the buyer is allowed to receive for legitimate buyer closing costs.' Because if we look at pre-3/15, the seller was allowed to pay the buyer commission on the representation on the other side of the HUD-1. So why wouldn't very specific language continue to allow that? There's lots of talk of maybe products that come out that allow the seller to finance or the buyer to finance the compensation they want to offer to their agent, and maybe that's an evolution that we see. But the LO-to-realtor relationship is a very powerful bond because you're both expertly guiding that purchaser to the closing table. So I think LOs need to stay as aware and educated. A lot of the messages I've gotten in the last 11 days are from LOs saying, 'How do we stay on top of this?' I've heard folks offering to attend that buyer consultation with their realtor partner to help edify and solidify that value proposition of working with professionals.

I think it's going to continue to be through that purgatory, that messy middle. And again, post the new rules of engagement which are still to be set, I think that'll all work its way out. I saw a post on LinkedIn this morning of a gentleman who operates in the lead space and said in the last 24 hours he's received a call to cancel all of their buyer leads, and someone else who called and said, 'Get me all the buyer leads you can, because we're about to formalize our buyer representation; this is going to be better than ever.' So it's definitely a tale of multiple interpretations in this purgatory phase. I'm seeing folks that are very upset and telling me they're going to get out of the business, and then I've had other folks tell me that this is the biggest boon they've seen as an opportunity. I choose to withhold emotion from stuff like this. These are the new rules. My job is to deliver the tools and the platform for these entrepreneurs to move forward.

Chief Strategy Officer can sometimes be confusing as a title to folks, so I've summed it up in a sentence: my job is to make being an eXp agent better than not being an eXp agent. That touches a whole lot of things, and again, we are a real estate company at our core—we don't get confused about that. So this is a very operational shift and education-based shift. Pre-3/15, I had a to-do list that was literally thrown out the window on Monday morning, and we said, 'How do we get all the tools and answers to our agents in their hands as fast as possible on an on-demand basis?' We have lots of brokers who are very available, and I think this is going to be a very intense and handholding experience where we have to put our arms around our people. I'm saying this to any leader in the space: you have to double and triple the amount of effort and availability and have to be that calming voice. I think there are going to be new opportunities and new business models that arrive, and as a broker, it is my job to then offer the tools and services for them to experiment and serve buyers. I, personally as a company, don't want to limit folks. As long as it's legal and ethical and follows within the rules of that state, we will allow it, and we will support it, and we will be there to share what's worked and what hasn't worked, to mastermind within our company with our top producers so best practices can be shared. In this moment of leadership, it's operational first, education right with it, and then if there's some new technology and efficiencies that can be gleaned, upgraded. Every morning I wake up and figure out how can we do more with less, how can we become better from a unit economic standpoint, how do we allow agents to build as big of a business as they choose to on our platform.

Appreciate it. And any other leader out there, with or without our company—if there are any questions, I think this is the time to reach across companies and come together, because we're all in this together. This is not a one-company problem to navigate; this is a new reality we're all dealing with together.

Pleasure to join you in person today here in Colorado.