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EXp World Holdings, parent to eXp Realty, has sold off the Virbela platform that created its virtual metaverse environment, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The filing states that the sale closed on Nov. 29. Virbela cofounders Alex Howland and Erik Hill — who also served as Virbela’s president and vice president, respectively — acquired the company from eXp.
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Howland and Hill had continued with Virbela after eXp acquired the company in 2018. The filing reveals that in exchange for the firm they founded, the two executives waived a total of $252,100 in severance that they were entitled to get after being terminated from eXp. Their terminations were completed when the Virbela sale closed.
However, the SEC filing does not mention any other payments Howland and Hill made to re-acquire Virbela.
Inman has reached out to eXp and will update this story with any information the company provides.
News of the sale was first reported in early December by Investing.com. Real Estate News then reported on the story this week.
EXp first announced that it was acquiring Virbela in 2018. The company did not say at the time how much it paid for the platform, which it had been using since 2016 to offer a cloud-based virtual world to agents and staff. In the years following the acquisition, eXp and founder Glenn Sanford often touted the virtual world as a key differentiator for the company. In 2020, Sanford offered a detailed tour of the virtual world — which some observers have likened to the video game Second Life — at Inman Connect New York.
More recently, however, eXp virtual world has appeared to take a backseat to other differentiators. Inman has reported extensively on brokerages’ recent battles for top agent talent, and eXp has often made headlines for its victories in the so-called recruiting wars. However, those newly recruited agents and team leaders have rarely, if ever, singled out eXp’s virtual world as among the things that drew them to the company.
Last month, Inman also spoke with eXp Realty Chief Marketing Officer Wendy Forsythe about recruiting for the ongoing talking talent series. The conversation touched on company culture, revenue sharing, and other topics — but Virbela, virtual worlds, and the metaverse never came up in the conversation.
EXp’s move to emphasize other aspects of its business appears to have coincided with a broader cooling interest in virtual worlds. In recent years, for example, Facebook began investing heavily in its own metaverse project. However, by early 2024 the project was reportedly costing the company billions, and some reports indicated the company was quietly moving on from the concept. Today, the concept is rarely mentioned — either by Facebook, eXp, or any other company — as the next exciting technological frontier.
