eXp World Holdings, Inc.

All right, so we have quite a few people joining us. Let's get started. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the eXp World Holdings second quarter 2024 earnings fireside chat via live stream and our metaverse on the web frame. My name is Denise Garcia, and I manage investor relations for eXp World Holdings. Today, we will begin our earnings fireside chat with prepared remarks from Glenn Sanford, founder, chairman, and CEO of eXp World Holdings, and Leo Pereja, CEO of eXp Realty, followed by a review of the second quarter 2024 financial highlights presented by Kent Chang, principal financial officer and chief accounting officer of eXp World Holdings. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call to a Q&A session with eXp World Holdings Covering Analysts and questions submitted to eXp in advance. Let's begin with a review of the forward-looking statements. There'll be a number of forward-looking statements made today that should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary statements contained in the company's SEC filings. Forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. Please see our filings with the SEC, including our most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q for a discussion of specific risks that may affect our business, performance, and financial condition. We assume no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements or information. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded, and a replay will also be available on expworldholdings.com. Now for a few logistics, and we'll get started. For those of you joining in Frame today, welcome to our metaverse on the web. To zoom into a specific screen, you can click on that screen and then click Zoom In. If the content on that screen disappears or if you lose audio, simply refresh your page. While in Frame, if you need help, just use the Help button on the bottom right to link with tech support. Should you wish to ask a question during our presentation, You can enter your questions by scanning the QR code presented on this screen with your mobile phone, or go to slido.com and type in the event EXPI. From there, you can submit a question or vote up an existing question by giving a thumbs up, if you'd also like another question asked. This screen will remain up on the right-hand side of the stage throughout our presentation. Now I'll turn the fireside chat over to our speakers before opening the call to questions. Glenn, you may begin.

Thanks, Denise. And thanks, everyone, for attending this Q2 earnings call. Obviously, what we're doing here is really iterating on the agent value proposition. That's what we talk about all the time at EXP. And really, we've got a unique overall platform that focuses on personal development, uh, you know, helping agents sell more property. Uh, obviously we have success magazine, which is tied into, uh, that personal development side of the business. Uh, and, and then we've got, you know, companies like frame, which is obviously the metaverse that we're in now. Uh, but all of this is really designed to help us as a brokerage scale, uh, around the world. Uh, You'll notice, like, in the next slide, in Q2, our NPS, our agent net promoter score, actually increased from 72 to 76, which is world-class, to say the least. And this really reflects our investments in services, faster payments. We've got platforms like Revenos, our global referral network that's actually starting to take shape. how we're approaching international, which I'm actually more involved in now for obvious reasons. Some of you may know about some of the changes there, but we're really focused on how do we improve the agent value proposition? Because we do know that NPS is a leading indicator for both our future growth and retention, which ultimately translates to sort of the long-term financial viability of the company. Real estate sales transaction increased by 1%, revenue grew by 5%, and really that was driven by a 6% increase in our overall agent productivity, which is pretty amazing to see our agents producing more in a difficult market. We had productivity gains from providing more tools and incentives to highly productive agents. I know Leo's going to talk a little bit about I think he's going to talk a little bit about Fast Start, but Fast Start's a really cool program relative to our Revenue Share 2.0 program that's, again, geared toward attracting productive agents and helping agents during their first year really outproduce maybe where they would have normally because they've got more encouragement from their upline and some other things that go along with that. But we're really positioned to capture growth around the world. Internationally, revenues jumped by 69% year over year. There was strong performance in both sales, volume, productivity. Our agent count really didn't change a whole bunch overall, but that's because a lot of our agents that were in international in the initial launch into international were non-productive. We actually changed it to looking at agents who have two years or more experience are the ones that we're actually bringing over to eXp now. And that's really changed your trajectory internationally. You'll obviously notice that our losses are reduced over previous timeframes, but really it's an untapped opportunity when we look at the fact that there's likely somewhere around, it's hard to track the stats, but there's likely around 20 million plus real estate professionals in the markets that we want to compete in over time. And so if we really think about that as our target market, and we get to a similar size that we are in the U.S., that's almost a million agents worldwide that could eventually be on the eXp platform. So we're really excited about that long-term, you know, we'll just say 10-year vision of where we're going. And actually even more recently, you know, I'm actually working directly with the international team, bringing a lot of the startup culture into international personally and working with various team leaders, country leaders, our existing amazing team that we've got growing international. But as I've mentioned in previous calls, this is really important to me. And, you know, between going to Lisbon in June for our, our first EXP con internationally to, to, Take another trip there in September to work with some of our international team in September, October. We're taking a lot more hands-on approach to international growth. We also launched, just so you know, Elevate Coaching, which is really an extension of our eXp University and mentor programs. And we've launched that also. And then the global agent referral platform is amazing how we're able to, because of our size, be able to share both consumers that are looking to buy or sell real estate and also sharing properties on an international basis, especially when you get to that luxury market where the international luxury buyer could be looking at multiple countries around the world for opportunities. So really a lot of unique stuff that's going on around that. And then with that, let me go ahead and turn it over to Leo, who will walk you through some of the second quarter highlights in North America.

Leo. Thanks, Glenn, and thanks for everyone for joining us today. I'll start off with our Q2 performance compared to the industry. Last week, we saw June home existing sales at a low point for 2024, down more than 5% year over year, month over month. This downward pressure for Q2 home sale transactions in the U.S., which were down nearly 3.5% year over year, despite the industry being down nearly 3.5%, eXp Realty is only down 3%. Year-to-date, the industry is down slightly more than 3% over last year, while eXp is basically flat by being down less than 1%. I truly believe that our market share gains are a reflection on the quality of agents and talent we're attracting to our company. Kendall Bonner joined eXp Realty as a VP of Industry Relations, who was recently named 2024 Housing Woman of Influence. Tanya Meen, TV host and real estate expert, has joined eXp during that quarter. And 44% of our agents made the list for the 2024 Realtrends and Tom Ferry 1000 Awards, which has the 500 top agents and 500 top teams in the U.S. by transaction and volume count. We recognize that in order to maintain the highest quality agent base in the industry, we constantly have to iterate on our agent value proposition to remain the most agent-centric brokerage on the planet. During last earnings call, we announced RevShare 2.0 in the first 60 days of the program. We paid out nearly $7 million in real-time RevShare. During Q2, we also launched our global referral program, which extends the reach of all of our agents to our additional 22 international markets So agents can find partners across the globe and across the ocean to expand their business. And more recently, we launched Fast Start Attraction Bonus Program July 1st, which offers direct upline sponsorship of 50% payout on the revenue share pool on all qualifying level one transactions for an agent joining their first year at eXp. Some of the initiatives we started last year have really started to gain traction. Some of the ones I'm most excited about, I'll share about. EXP exclusives, which went live late last year, is starting to gain traction and really add a value proposition to our agents as we navigate this low inventory environment and this changing landscape. Express offers, which we rebooted it with a partnership with Opendoor, led to over 2300 property submissions to Opendoor alone in Q2. EXP Luxury, our platform that provides agents with tools and resources to increase their production, increased the number of agents by over 130% year-over-year. We're seeing higher adoption rates for training and educations, which increased 127% in attendance year-to-date for 2024 compared to 2023 for the same time period. PayNow, our real-time payment program we launched recently, In order to pay folks faster, which is particularly important in these times where agents are closing fewer transactions, is taking off like wildfire. We're happy to see our agents take advantage of the kind of programs we've created in order to help them lead more productive lives and make their businesses run smoother. We've discussed our significant opportunities to see an agent improvement productivity with integrating AI technologies across our entire enterprise. We have an enterprise license with OpenAI that we're leveraging with ChatGPT to increase our staff productivity. Our staff sent more than 1 million messages in Q2, up 108% from Q1 of this year by leveraging AI to become more productive internally. The task center has also aided in the completion of over 710,000 tasks of agents invoices and transaction documents across five different operational teams and 15 different role types year to date. We continue to leverage HubSpot technology to service agents, and we've closed over 1 million agent tickets worldwide in Q2. And most recently, we replaced Rebella with the web-based frame technology that we're all using right now to make it faster and easier for our staff and agents to collaborate online and has been wildly popular with more than 1.1 million visits in the first half of 2024. We're really excited to continue the integration of cutting-edge technology solutions on our platform, the long-term opportunity AI could represent as we continue to seek operational efficiencies, which I'll discuss on the next slide. This quarter, we reduced our SG&A expenses in North American realty by $4 million over last year. At the same time, we reduced our cost per transaction in North American realty by nearly 10% year-over-year, and improved our operating efficiencies, increasing North American adjusted by 13%. For an update on the real estate market, we've been providing as much education and tools through our regional rallies, virtual meetings, and as many places as we can communicate with our agents. Our buyer representation toolkit, which includes a buyer broker representation agreement that the CFA recently recognizes much simpler, clearer, and pro-consumer than any other agreement that's been created recently, is something we've open sourced so all agents in the industry have access to what's being considered the best-in-class documents in order to make this transition as smooth as possible, which will go into effect on August 17th. Many people have asked me how this will impact the number of agents and market and the process. First, buyers have the option not have an agent represent them just like they did in the past, but most have chosen to hire an agent because the process is very time consuming and complicated than most people understand prior to engaging with an agent. In my opinion, buyers will still choose representation and will continue to need expert guidance throughout their process. After August 17th, we'll likely experience an adjustment period, which I've been calling on several formats and stages, the messy middle, as both agents and consumers adjust to the new rules of engagement. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kent, who will walk you through our financials, and we'll open the call up for questions. Thank you, Leo.