Real Estate Agents Aren’t Going Away: eXp Realty’s Leo Pareja on the Real Estate Brokerage World

Thanks for having me, and that's a hell of an intro. I appreciate that, Jonathan.

It flared up in my opinion two years ago, and I got loud about it back then with CFP and enforcing rules. And so what I think, and again, I'm a policy real estate nerd so I think I'm in good company here, but it's really appreciating how North American real estate works. We as Americans and Canadians completely take a transparent, complete, liquid total market for granted because we enjoy these things called MLSs. I operate in 29 countries. We sell a lot of real estate outside of North America, and we just kind of take this thing for granted. It's a slowly evolutionary based thing that happened. It wasn't dreamt up in a lab. It happened super organically, and right now there are some folks who are trying to rip it apart, in my opinion, for economic gain and have wrapped it up in really cute marketing speak calling it seller choice. I sold real estate for 15 years. That's how you and I met, Jonathan, when I represented Fannie Mae. I've never had a seller in my entire life say, 'Hey, I want to sell my house, but I want you to keep it a secret.' That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. That is not a thing. I've had maybe a federal judge or a DEA agent on the border in El Paso who said, 'I can't have my stuff out there because my family might get targeted.' Those are two examples. And then everybody goes to the celebrity. The median home price in this country has nothing to do with that. I think it's just an attempt to double in deals, period. The question I would ask any practitioner is, would you do that with your own house? If you were fixing and flipping a house or getting ready to sell your one property as a realtor, what would you do? Unequivocally, they would say, 'I put it on the market.' When I was at Fannie Mae, you guys had a first look period — it had to be on the MLS for 14 days minimum before you would accept an offer. You guys, as the largest seller of properties during the financial crisis, understood that the more exposure the better. It was in my listing agreement that I had to syndicate to all these places. Exposure was the name of the game. A couple things have shifted structurally. 15 years ago, there were no national brokerages. You opened up by saying how many agents I have. In the United States alone, I have 63,000 agents that in 2025 did 343,000 transactions for almost 190 billion in sales. We didn't exist when a lot of these rules and systems were built. You didn't have companies that had hundreds of millions of dollars in cash in the bank with liquidity access to capital markets where they can borrow billions of dollars to go buy their competitors. What we enjoy in this country is special. I think we forget what MLSs are. I think people reduce them to databases, but they're actually cooperatives. It's a cooperative in the same sense of what farmers did to compete with big agro — 'Hey, we're going to pull our resources for a benefit to everyone.' The benefit is I give you my data on the same day you give me your data. It keeps the cost down for everybody, which ultimately gets passed along to the consumer. The consumer gets a complete unified experience. If you want an example of what that doesn't feel like, jump over to France, jump over to Spain, jump over to any other first world country that doesn't enjoy this. Consumers are going to eight or nine websites, having to call eight or nine different listing agents and setting eight or nine different appointments because buyer agency doesn't exist. I can go on this topic.

That is why I think they're doing it. That's not what they're publicly saying.

I think it's a brilliant exercise in marketing by calling it price discovery and all these fancy terms. But this is the one sentence that I always go back to for folks who can't get their head around it: The concept of 'let me try it off the market before I put it on the market' is predicated on a market. Let that sink in. Let's just say we all tried off the market. Then there is no on the market. It's a fragile ecosystem. A lot of folks talk about multiple strategies. It's black and white when you look at it. The breaking point of a marketplace is minimal. If enough stuff is no longer on the market, then we don't assume there's a market. A two-sided marketplace is one of the hardest things to create. That's why you see things like there's only one Amazon, there's only one eBay. Two-sided marketplaces, I think in capitalism, are probably the hardest things to create. And to have a cooperative one that's not owned by a single entity is almost like magic of capitalism. The fact that fierce competitors just agree to work in this system. I was explaining to a room full of MLS executives recently, I said, 'Guys, we are all elephants with a rope around our foot tied to a stake in the ground. At any point, we can actually trample you and each other.' The system is wonderful the way it is because it gives buyers and sellers a fair opportunity. I don't know of another way to prove true market economics other than exposing it to the most amount of people. If we underprice it, you'll get 60 offers. If you overprice it, days on market — a real litmus test of accuracy and purity in the data. You don't get offers and you lower the price. We can't have both ways. We just need to choose what we want. I truly believe this keeps the cost down to the consumer. I would jump over to Australia where REA Group has a real monopoly. If a seller wants more economics, they have to pay on top of their commissions. I think there's this jump to think the cost of sale is much lower in other countries, but not if you itemize it and add it all up. In the G7, I think we're the fourth cheapest country to sell a home in when you add in all the things. But I don't think a lot of people pause and drill down and, in fairness, have a global perspective like the one we have.

I'll address it with how I look at it. I genuinely think there's a positive for America. And maybe it almost sounds like I'm stomping to run for politics — I'm not. What is at risk is the financial system we enjoy. I think Jonathan's past can speak to this. We enjoy 96.5% financing. That's a real thing in this country. What percentage of loans last year or this year are FHA? It's like 29%. The concept of a cash-out refinance or high LTV or MI is predicated on perfect data. What's the LTV in Colombia? It's 50/50. You put in a dollar, I put in a dollar. That's the only way I know that you're not going to run away with my money. It's a five-year balloon, it's IO, it behaves just like commercial paper. The same in Spain and France. This whole 'let me get a mortgage online digitally through a workflow and we can close without a human being' — that's what you guys are working towards, that's what fintech is working towards. That is predicated on financial institutions being able to create securities that trust what we say the property is worth. I asked an agent in Italy who's listing a Tuscan villa for us, 'How do you price it?' She literally went, finger in the air — total guess. So when you ask me, am I being self-serving? I think that's what's at risk. I also tell people, don't forget, I actually do this in 27 countries at scale. I think I'm uniquely qualified and prepared if the world switches on me. But I will say, I think the cost will go up. The portals don't go away because we stop cooperating. They change their business model. They pivot to an advertising model. Last year, 2024, 2025, REA Group tried to buy Rightmove in the UK. Do you guys remember that headline? They went at it three times. I think the last offer was like 8.6 billion all cash, they turned it down. When I looked at the math of total transactions that took place in the UK over the same period in Zillow in the US by total transactions to market cap on offer, my math said that Zillow was underpriced by three times if you had the revenue model that Rightmove has. The portals would love to have an advertising model. They'd make a lot more money because they already own the eyeballs. When someone says, 'Aren't you mad that these portals monetize our stuff?' I'm like, 'I'm not mad they don't send me a bill.' Rightmove sends me a massive bill every month. All of them — Realtor.com, Zillow, Redfin. I think it is my fiduciary responsibility as the CEO of a brokerage to have our listings on behalf of our sellers on as many eyeballs as possible. In any other version of the world, I'm gray enough that I used to post listings in the Washington Post in 2002 to drive eyeballs to an open house. That is now a feature in all of the portals for free. I was paying $165 in 2002 for like 15 words. Do the adjusted for inflation if you wanted to do an ad for an open house. So, I'm okay with them monetizing the data as long as I am making sure that our sellers' listings are exposed to the most amount of eyeballs in the shortest amount of time. My definition of capitalism, which I talk about all the time to my agents, is removing friction from a product or service. Period. Any entrepreneur building anything is creating a frictionless process. That's who wins. This feels like a whole lot of friction added in for pure economics, which isn't sustainable. It'll get disrupted. So, partly it's noise, but it is going to add friction to the world.

I've got myself out of the prediction business. I told a reporter two years ago that no one would ever buy Anywhere because of the size, scale, and debt, and I was very publicly proven incorrect. It was funny because I told her I was 100% degree of certainty, no one can buy it. The day she dropped the article, she called me and said, 'Do you remember?' I was like, 'Oh yeah, I remember.' So I'm now very consciously saying 99% probability. But on this question, I actually have no probabilistic outcome. What I can tell you is I have a plan A, B, C, D, and E. I think that's my fiduciary responsibility to the enterprise. If this happens, I'll do that. If that happens, I'll do this. By the way, my plans are already built. The infrastructure, the plumbing — it doesn't matter to me in the sense that I care as a practitioner, I care as someone who advocated for buyers and sellers my entire career on the pure advocacy side, but as a leader of a large enterprise, I have a plan A, B, C, D, and E. All of the plumbing is already built to facilitate commerce no matter what happens.

I think that's the part that goes to the noise. I don't really spend too much... In everything, you have to live in the dichotomy of the clouds and the dirt. The dirt is the — are we onboarding people? Are we closing transactions? Do we have all the tools to facilitate the transactions? And then the clouds is — in a black swan event, how do I get properties on? A black swan event in my opinion was the Chicago MLS turning off the listings. Six months prior, as I was seeing the tea leaves, I had a high degree, 99% chance that at some point someone was going to try something like that. So we put in a direct feed into Zillow directly. The day those listings went dark, ours were the only ones in the family of companies we own, like EXp and NextHome. Our listings were the only ones in the Chicagoland area in the first couple hours. Other people signed direct feed agreements as a reaction too. I also have direct feeds into every national portal. Forget politics — let's say an MLS gets hacked by a nefarious actor who holds some ransom for Bitcoin and we cannot access the input module. That's not a far-fetched idea. That actually happened two and a half years ago to Rapattoni, and 12 of my markets went dark. I was like, 'Oh [expletive], I can never let that happen again.' So when I give you the A, B, D options, it may not even be a bully trying to monetize. I need to plan for black swan events of all types. I track agent onboarding, agent offboarding, transactions, volume, GCI — all of the things. But one of the best compliments I recently received at an agent event was an agent came up to me and said, 'I feel safe at this company with you.' I said, 'Tell me more.' She said, 'Right now, there's so many headlines that are scary sounding, but all I have to do is wait 30 more minutes and then I get an email from the company, probably from you, specifically telling us not to worry about it. It's all taken care of. Click this button. We have a solution. Your listings aren't down, whatever it is.' The goal for us, again, I'm a platform to the agents. I want to remove friction from their lives. We eat our own dog food. How do we make your job effortless because we're minding the shop in the background, which allows you to be hyper present in someone's living room and in the car, making sure that you're negotiating terms that are creative to that family's moment in time.

I'll address America first. Q4 of every year, I kind of do a media tour where everybody wants me to make a prediction. It's fun because I get to be right and wrong publicly often. Q4 of 2025, I was adamant. Fannie Mae said 14%. I was like, 'No, they're smoking something.' Freddie Mac said between 4 and 6. I was still like, 'They're also doing something.' They asked me what I thought, I said flat if we're lucky. They asked why I was such a pessimist. I said, 'It's the macro, it's obvious.' I sat at the kitchen table and was in the car with people. Even if you are financially ready, if you see a headline like AI is going to destroy 60% of jobs or we're going to war on three fronts, and you're a renter about to sign for the first time a 30-year commitment with a personal guarantee, you go, 'Maybe I'll renew for one more year. Let's wait till it all calms down.' It's like, 'Hey, you have a government job, AI's not taking your job.' 'Oh, I didn't think about that.' It's the headline — 'if it bleeds, it leads' — has gone from a couple hour news cycle to a 3-second news cycle because Meta and Google and everybody else are selling attention. I read a fascinating thing recently: the world is an order of magnitude safer than it was in the '80s — murder per capita, violent crimes. The difference now, and it was in an article in The Economist, is that if a bus in Peru full of children gets into a horrible accident on the side of the mountain, you might have read it on a Sunday in the Washington Post, back to my 2002 example. Versus now, you get to see the live stream on social of the kids screaming. Our psyches weren't designed to take this level of stimulus. Our nervous system has to be fried at this point. So that's where I made the prediction — the chaos in our government and economy is almost a feature, not a bug. I don't see that calming down anytime soon. Rates are not coming down. My clickbait quote I said to a reporter recently was, 'I again making predictions.' They asked me to predict rates. I made a weighted range bet: I bet you I'll see a 7 before I see a 5 in front of them. The reason I phrase it like that is because in the 5s we get into that Goldilocks range of unlocking seller lock. On 3% rates, you might sell a house with a 3.5% rate if you can get a 5% rate. It's really hard at 7. It's almost doubling with payment shock. Even if you capture a bunch of equity, you'd have to be going from the Northeast down to the Sun Belt in a half event of pricing. I don't see that getting any better. I think affordability is the biggest problem we have in this country. I don't have a magic wand. If I was a legislator and they said, 'Give me one idea,' I would increase the owner-occupant tax exemption. I'd double it. We haven't touched it since 1997. I think people forget that those memes on the internet about boomers having bought their house for $46 and a pack of Skittles — most of them, my parents included, are on fixed income. With appreciation and inflation affecting their cost of everything else, if their asset is all they have left and you're going to hit them with long-term capital gains, and some of these houses they've owned for 28 and a half years so there's no more depreciation, they're going to have some recapture. The more we can help stimulate that, I think, is way more interesting than saying institutional investors aren't going to buy a house. That's 1% of total inventory. It's so small in the grand scheme of things. It's far more interesting to talk about who owns most of the houses — boomers. How do we get them motivated to let go of some of that inventory?

The numbers set you free. The truth to me is in the data. We have seen usage of Realtors actually increase over the last 5 years. The frequency of selling a home is actually going up? No, the frequency is going down — the number of years in between is increasing. When I started selling, it was like every 7 years. Now it's 13 years. Partly because people are stuck in rate lock. People are aging more gracefully. My dad is 82 and could probably outrun the three of us. He looks fantastic — probably looks like he's in his late 60s. He's extremely mobile. They're not in a retirement home. They're hanging out with grandkids, traveling, doing stuff. So there are non-real estate things happening all at once. For every prediction of how AI was going to wipe out an entire industry, like the radiologist — I don't know if you've seen the data on that. AI should in theory have wiped them all out because it can predict stuff better. We actually had a 30% more demand for them because the mundane and routine is being done, but the expert is even more in demand now because the routine mundane stuff is being handled. When Expedia and Hotwire almost decimated the travel agent, there's been a crazy resurgence in travel agents lately just because there's so much information now and humans are craving an expert to discern the data and cut through the noise. So I believe there will always be demand for the expert who delivers a high level of value. I always say it's the sherpa. With all the technology in the world right now, and the sherpa analogy is one I use a lot with agents. Either one of you could tell me you want to climb Mount Everest. You can ask your LLM to produce the perfect workout routine to get you the right exercise, oxygen capacity, do all the workouts, give you the perfect shopping list of Gore-Tex and GPS. But when you two get to the base of the Himalayas, you better hire that local dude who's done it 400 times and can throw all that expensive [expletive] you bought on their back and tell you, 'Don't step there, you might fall off the damn cliff.' Or if a storm's coming, they can say that's no big deal, or 'Yo, let's turn around or you're going to be a popsicle.' Only someone who's done it 400 times has the ability to give you that expert advice. You can't read that in an LLM. For every example I've heard of someone successfully selling their house between them and GPT, they were a seller who had done this a couple times. It wasn't a first-time home buyer navigating an FHA loan with a non-occupant co-borrower and a down payment assistance program from the county. That's the Mount Everest of our industry — a first-time home buyer trying to buy a house today.

I tried it a couple times. I built this software myself.

It's always yes and no. One of the things that I rant a lot about on the internet is general entrepreneurship. I've built and sold businesses in multiple verticals now. Every entrepreneur has the same fallacy: 'Hey, I asked a bunch of people if they would pay me for this, so I built it.' The only real litmus test on the planet is 'give me your credit card number.' Product-market fit is like — surveys are great. So many of us get stuck in a feedback loop of an echo chamber. You build a product for real estate agents and your focus group is the tech volunteer group at the MLS. Do you know how specific they are? They are the early adopters. Of course, those 18 people thought it was cool. I was a high-performing team leader who built technology. I called my friends — Ben Kinney, Tim Healey, Tyler Smith — who all went on to build software companies. They were like, 'Yeah, this is crazy cool. You created a weapon of mass destruction from a marketing standpoint.' Then I turn it on and people say, 'Wow, this is a cool public record lookup system.' You just described my Ferrari and you never got it. I don't think you turned it on and put it in reverse and even took it out of the driveway. It's like my six-year-old sitting there pretending — you didn't even put it into first gear. But some of the craziest inventions in our world are accidental. Viagra was actually designed as heart medicine. In the blind study, there was this random side effect, and they created one of the most economically viable medicines on the planet. But that's what it was designed for. A lot of times you just have to get a product to market and see if people will part with their money. GLP-1 was designed for diabetes. This other crazy side effect has created what will probably become the most... I saw a post by Galloway the other day that said GLP-1s are more impactful to humanity than AI. He went on this whole tangent about how it's helping with addiction because food addiction is the same chemical trigger point as alcohol and all other things. To that effect, so many things in any industry — 'this is going to replace that.' I'm like, 'Show me.' People right now are using AI for the sake of AI versus asking, 'What is the problem we're solving? Friction point, product, service, experience. Okay, let's look at the available tools to solve it — SOP, people, automation, or AI — and then actually pull the trigger on the best solution.' That's how I think entrepreneurs should think of things, versus building something for the sake of building it.

The ones surrounding the ecosystem probably less than the public. I teach agents all the time. I think as an expert, and I think this is generally applicable, we all as practitioners take for granted what we do. For example, when I was an agent and I met with a first-time home buyer, I said, 'Hey, I'm going to make you a couple predictions that will come true. The week of closing, you're going to be in a super important meeting and your lender is going to send you a 911 text. They're going to ask for something asinine — like a copy of your lease in college that doesn't exist because you were in a dorm room. If you don't get it to them in the next hour, the underwriter is going to push the deal to next week. You've already handed over your apartment and your wife and kids are going to be homeless. You're going to be super mad. You're going to take a deep breath and text me, and I predicted this was going to happen, and we're just going to figure it out.' They laugh, and then it happens, and they're super mad but also say, 'How did you know?' Because it [expletive] happens 80% of the time. For the lenders listening, can we not do that? Can we please stop doing that? What's the probability of what I was saying going to happen? Pretty high, because that first-time home buyer — the Everest that you referred to — hasn't been solved yet. But again, as an agent, I do this every single day of my life and it's normal. No, it's not normal if you don't do this every day. There is a ton of friction in housing, which is why the role still exists. The disparities in where title is held, insurance, loan underwriting, non-QM versus QM, the experience, the negotiation. And then you remember that sellers do this an average of three times in their life, and buyers do it an average of three times in their life. There's all this emotional baggage that goes with it. Do you have the septic certificate that was not filed 8 years ago? You need someone who knows where to go specifically in the county to make it happen in two hours. I think the thing that all of us in the sector forget is the gargantuan task that is not normal to the average civilian. That gets forgotten all the time. All of us do these things that are like, 'Oh yeah, you just call the guy and it's fixed.' Only us weirdos in our corner of the economy understand the complexity and just forget. I think that's the part I can't explain to people enough. We kind of glaze over like it's normal. It's not normal.

I saw a Mark Cuban quote that shook me to my core. He said the problem with entrepreneurship is that a lot of founders who are not domain experts come into a space and see what they consider a blue ocean. Unlike other things in life, there is no actual graveyard with tombstones for us to go. They tried it and they tried it and they tried. They're like, 'Oh look, look at this open space.' No, no, that's not an open space. That's a graveyard. There are dead people underneath that empty patch you are looking at. It's really green and looks like very fertile land because there are a lot of dead cadavers there making the grass green. But there are no actual tombstones. They're just dead.

100%. I don't want to sound like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth. The amount of streamlining we've done on our back end that is being done by humans is blowing my mind. We're talking about 150 transactions going to like 232 transactions per person per day — real meaningful lift. For me, it's not about dropping that to the bottom line. It's about how do I then repurpose that human capital to better human experiences. The thesis I personally believe in is that over the next 3, 5, 10 years, the human experience is going to be at a massive premium. The more we automate, the more we become pushed toward a digital version of a human. I think we're going to appreciate real human connection and experiences, and they're going to be at a premium. As a founder, as a CEO, as an entrepreneur, I always go back to — you don't have to be all things to all people. Will there be a fully digital, AI-native brokerage that doesn't have a human interaction? Absolutely. Does that mean I have to build that? No, I do not. Just like there are brand-first companies that have no cap and have office space, and I don't know why anyone would be there. We're cloud-based with a cap, and there are agents at those brokerages that look at mine and go, 'I would never be at this virtual thing where I don't get to walk in and talk to someone.' So it's just finding your space. I don't know of a single product or service that is winner-take-all. You just need to figure out what corner of the economy you want to serve, make some money at it, and get to work with people you get along with every day.

Building technology has become a completely different conversation. As someone who's built and scaled tech, this is a game changer. Where it gets super interesting is the long tail of a development roadmap. You guys know what a development roadmap looks like. I would take the bottom 17 things. We both know they're never going to get built. Ever. They're just never going to be built because there's always a priority. But now I have my frontline teams just building it themselves in cloud cowork, Lovable, Cursor, pick your poison. It's technology that never had a large enough TAM or monetization strategy. We just built this super cool open house app that the broker ops team showed me. Not a single engineer was involved. It's in beta right now. You can put in a zip code, it shows all of our listings, and it generates the copy for an email from an agent wanting to hold a listing open to the listing agent. When they get there, there's a digital checklist of how many directional signs they put out and how many people came through. At the end, the agent who held it open can click a button and generate a PDF with generic contact information that they can hand to a listing agent, who can then show the seller the activity created over the weekend on their property. No one would ever build that. Your CAC would be too expensive to actually monetize it. But I have teams that can just build stuff now. We've entered an era I'm calling the disposable technology era. It's a micro-app, and you can throw it away. You can build an app for an event that is super specific to that event, and you don't have to build Eventbrite. You're just like, 'The Lawless party on Sunday.' John can build that for the Saturday party and throw it away when he's done. It costs nothing. As someone who spent 10 years of my life building technology, it's fascinating to even consider.

It's only a dollar, so it'll be on the App Store tomorrow.

No, I think you hit all the ones that are top of mind and important to me. I say this often, so I don't know if I'm just repeating things, but I think a lot of times when we get into these heavy political debates about the industry and theory of what's better, at the end of the day, just remember we're helping families make the most expensive decision of their life. It only happens that they move six times — three as a tenant, three as a home buyer. It's terrifying. It's expensive. It's the most emotional thing we ever do. When the three of us buy houses, we turn into an emotional bag of feelings even though we're in the industry. We all do. All logic is suspended. If we can remember that, let's just make that process better for the end consumer. That should put everything into perspective as we make decisions.

It's exactly how I did it when I was that age — house hack. I bought a four-bedroom when I was 20 years old and rented out three rooms to my friends. They paid my mortgage. I was like, 'Oh [expletive], I should do that a couple more times.' If I did it all over again, I would have bought a fourplex. I didn't know Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac FHA allowed me to go up to four units. I would have bought a four. I was like, 'Damn, I wish I would have known that.' I bought FHA. It was the greatest tool ever available to me. My father was my non-occupant co-borrower. I used my 3% commission as my down payment. That's magic. Compare any other country on the planet — you can't do that. A child bought a house and came out of pocket with zero dollars and built equity that eventually funded my startups. I am the definition of the American dream from what the housing economy creates in every facet — from a practitioner to a founder to scaling stuff. If you're 25, understand the power of leverage and the products available to you. Buy as much real estate as possible and try not to sell it. You'll be all right.

Thanks for having me.