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As the ever-simmering battle for top talent continues, eXp Realty announced this week that it has recruited a high-powered team in New York’s Hudson Valley away from RE/MAX.
Virginia Corbett
The Virginia Corbett Home Team includes both its namesake leader as well as 15 other agents. The team also has five full-time staff members, and is poised to welcome five additional recruits after fully transitioning to eXp, according to a company statement. The statement adds that the team did $70 million in sales volume last year, when it was with RE/MAX Town & Country.
The Virginia Corbett Home Team was also ranked 38th in the U.S. for transaction sides in 2022 on the Real Trends 1000 list of small teams.
In a statement, Virginia Corbett said she began researching brokerages in January 2023, ultimately talking to “dozens, if not hundreds, of people.”
“As I examined each option, I always went back to the question: What is the best option for the team as a whole and for each individual?” Corbett continued. “When you break it down so simply like that, there really is no other choice besides eXp.”
Corbett also chose eXp because other people in real estate she admires, including Kyle Whissel and Dan Beers, work at the company.
Prior to working in real estate, Corbett spent about two decades working for investment bank Credit Suisse, according to her LinkedIn page. She moved into real estate in 2018 and first worked at HomeSmart.
Corbett’s move to eXp comes at a time of intense competition in the real estate industry; as the market has slowed over the past year and a half, brokerages have had to fight for agents who can keep closing deals. That has, in turn, shifted somewhat the long-running battle for agent count — which for many years focused on sheer numbers — to quality over quantity.
Case in point: eXp’s July recruitment of top-producing Las Vegas agent Bryan Knisley and his team.
EXp has historically been a standout when it comes to growth, and its total agent count topped 88,000 as of the second quarter of this year. But in keeping with the broader trend in the industry, that number also represents a slower pace of growth compared to prior years.
In any case, eXp’s statement celebrated Corbett’s arrival at the company, ultimately describing the move as “game-changing.”
