Keeping in line with the first-quarter performance of its competitors, eXp World Holdings (EXPI) experienced one of its best quarters yet as a scorching-hot real estate market pushed its revenue up 115 percent year over year to $583.3 million.
The company continued to be profitable, albeit just barely, reporting a net income for the quarter of $4.8 million — a big jump from the first quarter of 2020 ($100,000) when the coronavirus flattened the company’s revenue and sales activity.
Glenn Sanford
“Our record first-quarter revenue and profitability is a direct result of agents continuing to find success leveraging eXp’s unique brokerage model and agent value proposition,” eXp World Holdings Founder, Chairman and CEO Glenn Sanford said in a written statement on Thursday. “Not only are we experiencing an acceleration in the number of agents joining eXp, but the agents we are attracting have proved to be increasingly productive and our Net Promoter Score continues to climb.”
The company’s Q1 agent count increased 77 percent annually to 50,333, which translates to more than 21,000 new agents joining the company since the first quarter of last year. EXp agents seized the momentum created in Q4 2020, with residential and commercial transaction sides closed increasing 95 percent year over year to 73,878, representing $24.5 billion in closed sales volume.
The company’s stock traded around $28.50 a share on Thursday morning, far off its 52-week high of $90 that it hit during a frenzied run-up in February. At the current share price, investors value the company at just over $4 billion.
EXp doubled down on its international expansion, with new brokerages in Puerto Rico, Brazil, Italy, Hong Kong and Colombia. The company plans to add new brokerage operations in Spain and Israel by the end of the second quarter of 2021.
“Our substantial year-over-year increases in revenue and cash flow generation were driven by industry-leading agent growth and sustained transaction volume,” eXp World Holdings Chief Collaboration Officer Jeff Whiteside said. “Beyond the inherent advantages of our agent compensation model, our tech-enabled offerings are increasingly contributing to our competitive position by enabling our company to scale at a rapid pace.”
“As we move forward, we will maintain our focus on finding innovative ways for real estate professionals to succeed in the most agent-centric model on the planet,” he added.
In addition to adding new international locations, eXp has been busy snapping up top teams from its competitors — the fulfillment of the company’s agent count strategy explained at the company’s eXpCON in November. There, the company laid the roadmap for its 2021 performance, which hinged on eXp Global and the rollout of several proprietary tech tools.
“We got to say we’re gonna have a lot of fun in 2021 with growth,” U.S. Growth President Dave Conord said, according to a previous Inman article. “We’re going to grow faster in the next year than the past four years combined.”
Conord said the company plans to have 100,000 agents by the end of 2021, a goal Sanford believes the company will achieve through its attractive virtual model and continued tech innovation.
“While the sustained strength in the broader real estate market has provided a complementary environment for our core operations, our record results are attributable to eXp’s commitment to surrounding our agents with an unmatched suite of tools and resources that drive positive engagement,” he said.
“This growth of our cloud-based business is being achieved entirely within our virtual working environment, which serves as a key differentiator for aggressively scaling our platform internationally, as well as in the U.S. where a significant opportunity to continue capturing market share remains.”
