The Real Brokerage, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Real Brokerage Second Quarter Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for questions and comments following the presentation. If you should require assistance throughout the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad to reach a live operator. At this time, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Investor Relations, James Cabanera. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you. And once again, welcome to REAL's second quarter 2021 earnings call. With me on the call are Tamir Poleg, Chief Executive Officer, and Michelle Ressler, Chief Financial Officer. This morning, REAL filed its unaudited interim financial statements and management discussion analysis for its second quarter ended June 30, 2021 on CDAR. These documents, along with the accompanying news release, can be found on CDAR. The content of this conference call should be considered in conjunction with and is qualified in its entirety by reference to such documents. I'll now read the Safe Harbor Statement. This statement is made pursuant to the Safe Harbor for forward-looking statements described in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements made on this call, with the exception of historical facts, may be considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Although the company believes that expectations and assumptions reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, it makes no assurances that such expectations will prove to have been correct. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to various risks and uncertainties. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements, please see risk factors detailed in the company's annual report contained in subsequent filed quarterly reports, as well as in other reports that the company files from time to time with CDAR. Any forward-looking statements included in this earnings call are made only as of the date of this call. We do not undertake any obligation to update or supplement any forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent knowledge, events, circumstances, unless otherwise mentioned. All references in this call reflect currency in U.S. dollars. This conference call will include references to adjusted EBITDA, which is a non-international financial reporting standard, IFRS, financial measure. Non-IFRS measures are not recognized measures under IFRS, do not have a standardized meaning prescribed by IFRS, and are therefore unlikely to be comparable to similar measures presented by other companies. Adjusted EBITDA is used as an alternative to net income by removing major non-cash items such as amortization, interest, stock-based compensation, current and deferred income, tax expenses, and other items management considers non-operating in nature. Adjusted EBITDA has no direct comparable IFRS financial measure. The company uses non-IFRS measures solely to provide investors with added insight into real financial performance. Listeners are cautioned that such non-IFRS measures may not be appropriate for any other purpose. Non-IFRS measures should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for measures of performance prepared in accordance with IFRS. Now I would like to turn the call over to Tamir Polig, Chief Executive Officer of REAL. Tamir, please proceed.

Thanks, James, and thanks, everyone, for joining today. As before, I would like to start by thanking the hundreds of agents who joined REAL in the past few months and to our community of agents who have contributed massively to the accelerated growth we are experiencing. I will now continue by highlighting some top-level financial results. Then I will provide some operational updates before turning it over to Michelle to dive deeper into our financials. After that, we will open up the call for Q&A. Okay. So let's start with the financial results. Q2 revenue was $23 million, an increase of 790% year over year. Driving that growth was 126% increase in real estate agents joining real, as well as an increase in the net revenue per agent of 362% to $1,506. We see no signs of growth slowing down at this point. turning to operating highlights. When we consider what is supporting our growth, it is a few operational factors and strategies, and those are geographical expansion, agent referral, retention, product focus, and the efficiency of our team. Beginning with geographic expansion, during the second quarter, we announced Rio's expansion into Oregon, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Arizona. That brings our tally to 31 states plus D.C. We look forward to the growth of each and every one of those states can bring to real. In terms of agent referrals, every new agent that joins us has the potential to bring other agents. We are seeing our agents reaching out and attracting other agents in their communities. Agents are incentivized to do so because real agents earn revenue share throughout five tiers of referrals, creating a network growth effect. Also, we believe that our story resonates with a lot of people. The culture of the agents we are attracting is also attracting other like-minded agents. In addition, we would assume that many of the agents in this country have never heard about real brokerage. So just the fact that we are becoming better known is opening the eyes of many agents. They suddenly realize there is a new company and a new opportunity that they should be mindful of and maybe look into. We feel that that is also driving growth. To give just one example, this is what led the LoveLocal real estate group to coming over to real in Q2. LoveLocal is a Nevada real estate group, which in 2020 completed over a thousand real estate transactions and 300 million enclosed home sales in the greater Las Vegas area. They saw what we were doing and they just joined us. Moving to retention, At RIO, we offer equity incentive plan for agents tested over years. In Q2, we took another important step forward as it relates to our equity as an attraction and retention incentive with cross-listing of our common shares on the NASA capital market. The equity incentive plan has allowed us to attract and retain more agents and more high-producing agents. We are constantly increasing the number of high-producing agents as demonstrated in our growth of revenue per agent numbers. Turning to our product focus, we have been spending the last six months on building a new internal system and a new agent app. We are pleased that this new app launched just two days ago. The app will give our agents better visibility into their business in real time. It will provide them with more services to enable them to service their clients in a better way. The app structure will allow us to add consumer-facing services in the future, which will help the home selling and buying experience feel much better for our agents and their clients. We intend to start testing some consumer-facing services by the end of this year. With respect to the new internal system that we have been building, we expect that that is going to allow us to scale to 100,000 agents without needing additional substantial investment in technology infrastructure. At the same time, we built a system that automates significant portions of the transaction processing. That will save us many of men hours per month. Finally, moving on to the efficiency of our team, we have had growth in the number of full-time employees, which has led a positive correlation to the volume of our agency and real estate transactions. This has been done very efficiently. In fact, as of June 30, 2021, we used an efficiency ratio, which is full-time employees divided by the number of agents that are on our team, was 1 to 61. An improvement over Q1, which was 1 to 56. We have a long-term target of 1 to 75. We view this as a competitive advantage in terms of how quickly and efficiently we can scale, and it provides benefits in future profit margins. For context, most companies in our field have a ratio closer to 1 to 25 or 1 to 30. Most of all, our agents who are receiving equity incentives and shareholders are also rewarded. RIO remains steadfast in its mission of having a positive impact on as many human beings as possible within the real estate space. At this point, I will now turn it over to Michelle for a more in-depth view of our financials. Michelle.

Thank you, Tamir. So I'll start by discussing some of our key financial results for the quarter. Our Q2 revenues grew 790% year-over-year to $23 million, from $2.5 million last year, same quarter. This increase is mostly driven by agent growth, which was up 126%, and net revenue per agent, which grew 362% year over year. This growth is further supported by the strength of the real estate market, making those high-producing agents and listing-focused teams that Tamir mentioned that we're attracting even more meaningful. If we look at gross profit, our gross profit was $2.4 million in Q2 2021 versus $281,000 in Q2 2020, and remaining study at around 11%. Our net loss for the quarter was $2.9 million compared to $1.2 million last year. This change was primarily a result of our stock-based compensation expense, which is a key contributor to our growth, retention of agents, full-time employees, and management personnel. However, it should be noted that the company is now cash flow positive. adjusted EBITDA loss for the quarter was reported at $496,000 in comparison to $1.2 million for the prior year. Management believes that adjusted EBITDA provides useful information about our financial performance and also helps identify underlying trends in our business that otherwise could be masked by the effect of the expenses that we exclude in adjusted EBITDA. In particular, We believe the exclusion of stock-based compensation expenses provides a useful supplemental measure in evaluating the performance of our operations and also provides better transparency into our results with operations. Overall, our operating expenses were $5.4 million in comparison to $1.5 million last year. On an adjusted a bit of basis, operating expenses were approximately $2.9 million, not compared to $1 million last year. The change is primarily due to stock-based compensation expenses as well as the one-time expenses such as those related to our listing on NASDAQ capital markets. General and administrative costs were $3.8 million in comparison to $482,000 in the prior year. The increase was mostly driven by the cost related to being a public company, increases in headcount, and further efforts to support our growth. G&A expenses is expected to increase going forward as we continue to scale rapidly. However, we do actively monitor spending and the impact on our bottom line. Marketing costs were $942,000 compared to $209,000 last year, and the change is primarily due to the revenue share paid to agents that Tara touched on previously as part of our revenue share model. Agents can earn revenue share for the new agents that they personally refer to real, and that is a major contributor to the increase in our agent count and revenue. we expect to see costs associated with our revenue share program to continue to translate into significant year-over-year revenue growth and believe it to be a very fruitful contributor to the long-term goals and success of the company. As a percentage of revenue, our sales general administrative costs were 21% in the current quarter versus 27% last year. Our balance sheet continues to strengthen with total cash on hand of $38 million, as well as an additional $9 million that we hold in short-term investments and securities, that are available for sale at fair value. This is an increase from the total cash balance of 1.7 million in the prior year. Cash flow from operations increased approximately 214% to 706,000 in the second quarter of 2021. Additionally, the company holds no debt. As a reminder, we received 2.6 million in US dollar or Canadian 32.8 million in proceeds from accelerated warrant exercises this quarter. Our second quarter was strong and the best in the history of our company. We only expect the significant year-over-year growth to continue to accelerate. That concludes my financial remarks. I will now ask the operator to open the phone line for Q&A. Operator, can you please pull for questions?

Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you do have a question, you may press star 1 on your telephone keypad at this time. If your question has been answered, you can remove yourself from the queue by pressing 1. Again, ladies and gentlemen, it's star 1. And our first question comes from David Afani from Roth Capital Partners. Go ahead. I'm sorry, Darren.

Hey, guys. It's Darren. Yeah. Nice work on the quarter. A couple of questions, if I may. What were the number of transactions you guys executed in Q2?

Hi, Darren, and thanks for initiating coverage earlier this week. I can very quickly give you the number of transactions. Can we move to the next question in the meantime?

Sure. the 23 million sales figure you guys reported was, uh, pretty big ramp from Q1. And I appreciate that you guys have added a number of new agents. I guess maybe, um, be helpful to understand, uh, just to get a sense for how quickly when you add agents, uh, in a given month, how quickly are they actually contributing to your PNL thereafter?

Yeah. Um, it's a good question. Actually, um, In the past, we've seen that it takes an agent an average of about three months to start contributing to revenue. What happened is that we're both attracting more higher producing agents, and at the same time, the real estate market is so hot that the average time that it takes to close a real estate transaction has shortened compared to a year ago. So what we're seeing is that... It's a matter of five to six weeks in most cases until we're starting to see some sort of a revenue contribution by an agent that joined us from the moment they joined until they start having some sort of an impact on our revenue.

Great. And then what was the cost per agent acquisition in the quarter?

Since... Probably over 95% of our agents are coming through referrals from existing agents in real. We barely spend any upfront money on marketing. So the cost of acquisition of agents who are coming through our digital advertising channels hovers around $500 per agent. Calculating... the cost of acquisition out of agents that came through RedShare is something that's a little bit early for now for us to calculate because since we are working in some sort of an affiliate model, whereas agents refer other agents to the company and then we split some sort of a general or future revenue of those agents who were attracted by other agents with the agents who attracted them, those things should be measured over time. And since we just started it less than a year ago, it's a little bit early to make those calculations. So for now, the only metric that we have on CAC is through the digital channels. And again, it's in the range of $500 per agent.

Great. And maybe last one for me. Where are you guys actually attracting agents from and people getting referrals? Sure.

We are seeing agents coming from... all across the board. I assume you're asking about specific brokerages or whether there are any specific brokerages that we focus on with our attraction or that we see some interest from. We see them coming from all across the board, mainly traditional brokerages, a lot of franchises. You know all the big names. I think that what COVID has done, COVID made a lot of agents kind of rethink where they are in their their affiliation with their brokerage and what their brokerage provides them in terms of the ability to work remotely and actually perform in this type of environment. So we're seeing a lot of interest and demand from agents who historically have been with traditional brokerages for, for throughout their, their careers and are now making the change to our model, which is more kind of modern and in line with, with how the, the, the overall industry operates.

Great. And then the transaction number, do you have that?

Yes. It's roughly 2,850 transactions. Great. Thank you. Sure.

And our next question comes from Tom White from DA Davidson. Go ahead, Tom.

Hi, this is Tevis Robinson on for Tom. I have two questions for you. The first one, I was just wondering how you guys feel about the value proposition for agents currently. It's clearly appealing for agents given like the insane growth, but curious whether you see it evolving or improving over time, especially as your competitors are tweaking their offering by adding other benefits like a dividend per se. So I have that one and then I'll have a follow-up after that.

Hi and thank you. Agents choose brokerages based on different factors. It's not necessarily the financial terms. It's a combination of a few things, and we actually are engaging in, you know, hundreds and thousands of conversations every month, so we have a lot of insight into what drives agents to look for a different brokerage and what are the factors they're considering when they're looking or thinking about a switch. And I will just specify a few of them. It's obviously the financial model. It's the culture of the company. It's the vision of the company. It's the technology that you can offer them in order to set them up for success in a better way. It's the equity incentives as well. Agents today understand that they're building an asset, and they want to build that asset and be partners in that rather than build an asset for somebody else. So it's a combination of things. We think that our offering is extremely attractive. And as we add more and more to the other things that I mentioned, more on the technology side, The culture that we're building is attracting other agents. And I think that we're building a very unique culture of collaborating, of working hard and being kind. And that messaging resonates with a lot of agents who want to be a part of it. It's also the early stage opportunity at this point. Agents understand that something big is happening and we are on our way. to change the industry, and they want to be a part of it. So it's not necessarily only the financial side. The financial side is part of it, but it's the entire package or the entire perception of where we live. It's also coupled with the branding. We are perceived as a younger, modern, with a sleeker kind of branding in the market, and that catches the eyes of a lot of agents.

Awesome. Thank you. And so for the second one, I was wondering if you could update us on your plans for ancillary products like Morgan and Tidal. You said that you might have one coming up in Q4, and I wondered how that might affect the margin profile of the business and the timetable for that.

Sure. At this point, we are and we have been very focused on the top of the funnel. So attracting agents that will be generating transactions and closings. And the only service that we now sell is real estate brokerage services. But at the end of the day, as you know, there are so many services that can be sold to a home buyer or a home seller in the time of the transaction. And naturally, we want to go into that. This week, we will be adding an executive to the company, somebody who is well known in our industry and many of the attendees on this call probably recognize the name. He will be focusing on building our ancillary services. We chose to do that pretty early on in the life of the company. The way we look at ancillary services is as a part of the consumer journey that we want to build, which is far more important than trying to monetize. We want to change the way people buy and sell homes. We want to provide a much better experience to our agents' clients because we think that there are some things that are broken right now for the consumers when they're buying and selling homes, and we want to change that using technology while leaving the agents in the middle of the transaction. And we believe that there is a way of having consumers enjoy both worlds. And throughout that journey, we also want to have the opportunity of selling additional services and we will be starting to build those services. As I mentioned earlier, we will probably start experimenting with at least one service before the end of the year. We're looking at insurance, title, and mortgage. I would assume we will be starting with insurance. But again, the way we look at it is not just, okay, let's build an insurance offering or a title company within real. We want to create a tech experience for our agents, clients. And through that experience, one of those things that will be accessible to them is additional services. So it's an effort in two directions. One is building the consumer journey, and second is setting up those ancillary services that will go into the consumer journey.

Great. Thank you so much for taking my question. Sure.

And that is the last question for today. We'd like to close the call. We thank you very much for joining today's conference. We appreciate your attendance. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day.