EXp Realty on Monday revealed the details of its Preferred Partners program, a new offering that provides eXp Realty agents and their clients with homebuying services.
The platform leverages partnerships to provide mortgage, title and escrow, home warranty and moving services right inside eXp Realty’s virtual world.
Glenn Sanford
“We’re starting to work on leveraging the ecosystem that we’ve built with the over 21,000 agents now, and helping them have best of breed choices and unique partnership opportunities in some of these business lines,” eXp World Holdings CEO Glenn Sanford told Inman.
For mortgages, the company is partnering with IntroLend First Cloud to create a lending platform that will integrate with eXp Realty’s existing technology. EXp will act as a mortgage company that refers lending opportunities to existing preferred lenders, Sanford said.
America’s Preferred Home Warranty will serve as eXp Realty’s home warranty partner, allowing buyers and sellers to choose their own licensed contractors when repairing or replacing home systems and appliances.
Mortgage and home warranty will be the first services available, although no specific time frame was outlined by eXp Realty.
Silverline Title & Escrow will offer title, escrow and settlements services to eXp Realty residential clients in the U.S. and Movinghub will allow eXp Realty buyers and sellers to manage, move, switch and compare home utility and home service providers at no cost.
“With the way that we work with our agents and brokers, they are open to best of breed relationships that we develop corporately,” Sanford said. “They’ll still have the choice to use whoever they want, whoever best serves their clients needs, but our job is to see if we can’t find some ways to be that company or provide that company to them, so they can more seamlessly work with them.”
The new partnerships won’t cost agents a dime, according to Sanford, and in fact, could overall help the company’s bottom line.
“[The] real estate brokerage [business] is fiercely competitive and there’s not a huge-amount margin in running a real estate brokerage,” Sanford said. “Every real estate brokerage that has achieved some sort of scale really monetizes their network of agents and brokers through additional relationships. A lot of times, those relationships are as much or more than the net profitability that comes from core brokerage, so it does add significantly.”
EXp World Holdings, the parent company of eXp Realty, announced its second-quarter earnings last week and reported agent count for the brokerage had surpassed the 20,000 mark, nearly double the number of agents it had in the second quarter of 2018. The company’s agents closed 35,837 transactions for $10.3 billion, increases of 80 percent and 94 percent, year-over-year, respectively.
That scale was a big key to these new partnerships, according to Sanford.
“When we were trying to have these conversations even just two years ago, a lot of the companies didn’t, at that time, think we were large enough to be a good partner for them,” Sanford said. “Now it’s a totally different conversation, we have people knocking on our doors, wanting to be our partner.”
EXp Realty has begun to build out a partners section in its virtual world, where agents will be able to access support and educational tools to train and assist them.
