KGCI: Real Estate on Air - eXp Realty’s Boldest Move Yet: Inside Their Worldwide Expansion!

Episode Date: June 20, 2025

This is everything they never told you about real estate with the AI queen Carrie Sovey, sharing the tech, tools, and lead gen strategies that top producers won't tell you about. Now, here's your host, Carrie. Welcome back, everybody. I am with a very special guest that I couldn't wait to get on this show. It's Felix Bravo, and Felix is actually our VP of International. growth at EXP. And there's, you know, obviously international growth, attraction.

And, you know, it's all a very hot topic right now, which is why I wanted to get you on here. And then I was just telling you before we started recording. I learned so much about you, uh, getting, diving deep into you. I use chat GPT for everything, obviously, you know, like, I know, like, I know, not a shocker. I learned so much about me. So thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I really appreciate you making the time. Absolutely.

Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I keep learning so much about AI from you. So anything I could do to be a sponge when I'm around you, I'm happy to do so. I love it. So, okay, one of the things I didn't know about you is you actually, you're kind of like born into real estate royalty, aren't you? I don't know. Royalty.

You're giving my mom a lot of kudos there. Yeah, I was originally born in Venezuela and my mom was a lawyer there. We moved to the United States when I was pretty young, like seven. Within a couple of years of her being here, she did what everybody in the United States does when they have no idea what to do with their lives and that's go out and get a real estate license because she was not going to learn English and go to law school all over again. So she got a real estate license and she used to do real estate law in Ben's well, actually. So she got a real estate license or she was attempting to get a real estate license.

But at the time, in Florida, we have so many Spanish-speaking agents, like who don't even need to learn English and can sell hundreds of homes a year without ever using English. At the time, though, we didn't have the state exam in Spanish, which just wasn't available. You could not take your real estate license test. So we had already been here for a couple of years. I was really young, so I picked up English super fast. And my mom just still didn't have very good English. I joke with her that her English still isn't great today, but I don't think she likes that joke very much anymore. But at the time, she was trying to study for the test and she kept failing the exam.

And so finally she sat me down. My dad didn't speak English yet either. And so she sat me down and was like, you're going to help me figure this out. And so I was sitting there doing flashcards on like real estate law, Florida real estate law. Like I knew how many square feet were in a meter, how many meters were in a mile. I make sure I forgot already. But I knew that at like the age of like nine or 10. And so I helped her study for the exam.

In return, I got like two PlayStation. games or something like that. Something so. But I always joke that I could have been an agent by the age of 10 because I really could pass that exam at that point. So that was my first kind of experience into it. And then my mom obviously still bring me on like open houses and all this kind of stuff. So I was that little kid at open houses handing out like cookies, asking people to sign

the registration forms. So I learned quite a lot about real estate. I never thought I was going to get into it. I thought I was going to get into the world of finance. And I had this big dream of finance and working on Wall Street and sort of ended up sneaking my way into real estate and here we are. Yeah, 10 years later. And another thing about you when you were practicing in real estate is you kind of started

in the luxury pre-con niche, which is I can totally align with. I started my career in pre-con and yeah, I feel like, I don't know how it is in the US, but I'm Canadian, you know that, right? So here in Canada, I feel like agents want to land these contracts with developers and builders because they think it's going to be easier. So let's address that. Is that pretty much the same idea down in the U.S. as well? Yeah, I think everybody wants to work. I mean, it's, it's high ticket prices, beautiful inventory. The marketing is usually like phenomenal. And a lot of people think it sort of just sells itself. But it is so hard. And there are so many nuances.

And it was a huge learning curve for me. When I ended up jumping back into or jumping to general real estate. I ended up finding general real estate slightly easier than working in the pre-construction world because it was just, especially in Miami, is so competitive. And yeah, I don't know where you want me to go with it. I can give a quick background of how I got into pre-construction. Yeah. I think some of these projects. So my first day in real estate, I had a buddy who his family operated a sales and marketing firm for a lot of pre-construction projects. And he kept telling me, come get your license, come work with me. And so I had moved to New York for college. I was 17. I graduated a year early in high school, not because I was smart, but because

when I moved from Venezuela out of the U.S., they just, they messed up and they bumped me up a year. I moved super hurdly for college, and I was back home for the summer. I had gotten my Florida license, and I was going to his parents' firm, and I was super nervous. So I called my buddy, and I'm like, Garrett, I cannot, like, for the life of me, I cannot show up to this, to this meeting with your dad without freaking out. I don't know what to say. and he was like, okay, don't worry. Like, I'm getting a haircut. Just come meet me at the barbershop and all or at the salon and I'll, you know,

I'll go with you. I was like, okay, cool. So I got there and I was like, well, I might as well get a haircut here. I'm like in a suit and tie. I was like, I should get a haircut. I go to get the haircut. And then the guy who's cutting my hair, his name was Ephraine. And he asked me, he's like, hey, so you seem like a young guy.

You're in a suit and tie. You have a briefcase. Like, what do you do? I was like, oh, I guess I work in real estate. I think. I think that's what I do. And he was like, oh, I'm looking to sell my property. So I picked up my first listing that day.

And it was not a luxury preconstruction project. It was like a $200,000 house. And it was like the nicest house in the worst neighborhood. And it was tough sales. So I learned a lot there. But I ended up working for Mark Portis and Adam Kaufman, who were here in Miami and in Aventura area. They had developed a lot of projects.

And I would show up to the office early every day and show leave late just because I wanted them to see me there before they got there. I could say hi. And then I wouldn't leave until they left just so I could say bye. Half the time, I didn't even know what I was doing. Like I just, I have no training. I have no idea. I just knew that like if they see me here, eventually something will happen. And after like four or five months of that, you know, we got a call and Mark Porta's the owner calls me and goes, hey, are you in the office? I said, yeah. He said, cool, come down. I need you to jump in the car with me. So I jump in the car and we drive to Bay Harbor Islands, which is here in South Florida. And we pull

up to these 12 townhouse, his 12 townhouse project called 101 Bay Harbor. And he's like, okay, we're going to go in, we're going to talk to these developers. I kind of know them. I think we can get the exclusives for this project. I was like, yeah, let's do it. And so we jump into this office and he's like, oh, this is my guy Felix. He's like young and new and just crushing it. He's already sold all these properties. He's like talking me up and I have no, I don't know anything about reconstruction. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I'm like, yeah, let's go. Let's jump into it. Like, whatever we got to do. We signed the contract. And then he looked at me and was like, great, buddy, you've got 12 listings now. It's all yours. Like, whatever you've got to do to sell it, sell them. And I was like,

okay, what does that mean? Like, what do I do? How do I get clients? How do I get buyers? He's like, just made calls. And I was like, call who? Like, what do I do? And so it was a little bit of forcing function by him. It forced me to learn. It was a really tough project to sell at the time, because it was three stories plus a rooftop in a neighborhood that was primarily retired. It was very friendly for retired folks and also for young families. It was like this weird in between. And young families who have little kids don't want three stories worth of staircases to get down to their kids' room or to go get water. And I've retired people a lot of times don't want to go up that many steps. So it was a tough project to sell.

And it took me quite a bit actually to sell the 12 units. But I learned a lot in that process. And then from there, I picked up a bunch of other projects along the way. And that was kind of my start into pre-construction. So I was fully involved in the pre-construction space. We sold five projects, I believe, from up until like 2019, was like, the last project we had. The last one being 2000 Ocean, which started at like 2.5 million and it's the most gorgeous building here. So I had some really good experiences and also got to sell

some general real estate on the side a little bit before eventually, you know, jumping away from the pre-construction world. Okay, so I got a question for you about this before we move on because, you know, agents just want to get into pre-con. They think it's going to be easier. If you're with a brokerage or a team that has a contract, it is easier. Yeah. They already have the contract. For those that, like, have the drive to go out and try to win these contracts themselves, what's the one piece of advice that you would give them and how they can set

themselves apart to land one of these contracts? Yeah. So for me, EXP is actually one of the reasons I joined was because once I understood the model, I realized how much more competitive we could be. for developers. I joined not wanting to be in a corporate role. I joined bringing my team and wanting to kind of develop that. And so the good news is if you are at EXP, there's a lot of things that help you stand out. When you're talking to developers, whether it's luxury, whether it's, whatever it is, all a developer wants is to get eyes on their project. They want as many buyers

walking in and seeing it. They want as much promotion as possible. They want as many events as possible. And every developer wants to do it as cheap as possible. I don't care if it's like the Martin building here. They also are looking at marketing budgets and, you know, how much, how many dollars are I got to spend to get one eye on it? So for me, um, EXP was a platform where I could walk in and say, hey, it's not just me like tomorrow. You give me this exclusive listing. Tomorrow, I'm blasting this out in the way, if you're in the US and Canada across however many, you know, we're at 85,000 agents, I think in total worldwide. However many agents, I can put it on my Zen list. I can expose it to all these agents. I can get it in front of them. Tomorrow I will put

in front of 85,000 people. And that's completely separate from any external marketing. I will do local to market. That's just a whole other. You get that just for being apart with me. And I'm not going to list 30 of your properties on the MLS like all these other agents do and kind of dilute your marketing a bit. I'm going to put two or three up on the MLS and the other rest of the properties.

We will do developer inventory on our Zen list and listed off market, pocket listing, whatever the right term. I think on your market. And that's such a powerful conversation. And when the developer asks you like, great, well, what events are we going to be at? Amazing. We've got a ex-P-Con US. We've got AXPCon Canada.

We've got EXPCon international. Is your project in a place that's a very international market? I'm in 24 different markets right now in four countries in four months will be in 28. So you could say tomorrow I could have this in front of 100, 200 agents in Colombia. I can have this in front of 200 agents in Mexico. Like depending on where your buyers are coming in from, which for me and my Miami, the case was a lot of Latin America and a lot of Canada, I could expose this to the right people and get the right eyes on it. So you definitely have to have a very big drive and I think a little

bit of an eye for marketing as well, because it's not just put it on the MLS and do a couple social media posts. And I know we don't, you know, that's kind of the ongoing joke for agents a lot of times. I can just put it on the MLS and maybe take a couple of pictures. But you really have to have a little bit of a stronger eye for marketing and for bringing people to your project. That's what I would recommend. I'd also recommend just call every single agent in that market. Like if you're in Dallas, Texas or whatever suburb, go find who are the top 20 producing agents over the last six months in that market and invite them and offer them free drinks and food to come to the project and showcase it to them because those are the people

who are bringing buyers to that market. So that was a big strategy that ended up paying off a lot for me because that was on a budget a lot of the time. Yeah, absolutely. And I have something to add to that. So most of us have great uplines and sponsors within EXP. I know that forward thinking, developers now have a budget for sales team, but they also have a budget for influencers and marketing. And when they can get two, for one, they are very, very happy and utilize your upwind, your organization is expe, their influence, their following as well, because that will be a huge draw for any developer and cancel out any extra marketing that they may have to put money into, right? Because they're going to get some break with you.

With your contract, I think that's a great idea as well. And being at EXP, you could throw a rock and hit somebody that has a massive influence in this company. That is one of the biggest, I think, bonuses. One of the reasons I joined was, you know, proximity is power, right? So we had a 4,500 unit project in Pensacola, Florida, like six months ago, that a couple of our Florida agents had a contact to the developer. And so they brought it to us and we're sort of asking for help because it was a massive project and beyond the scope of what they had done in the past. And so we met with the developers in person.

We had a couple of conversations with them. We tapped in Avery Carl, who's one of the top producing agents in the U.S. And I think she sold something like $1 billion worth of short-term rentals in that market in that Pensacola area like 2022 or something like that. And forgive me, my stats are a little bit off. but we tapped her in, and they were even from separate downlines, separate upline, separate everything, and they were able to tag team it. They signed the exclusives with the developer. I think they've been working on, you know, they haven't launched sales yet, but it's just

kind of that story of everybody is so scared to seek for help. And I think EXP kind of mitigates that fear a little bit because if you just start getting slightly involved, you'll get pushed into it. And next thing you know, you're having conversations with a carry or, you know, an Avery or whoever, it is. So for me, that's super important as an agent because this business is super entrepreneurial. And I don't know what it's like in Canada, but in Florida, when you get your license, they teach you a bunch of laws and then go, and then nothing. I'll do it. And that's it. Like, there's no, there's no other training. There's no, no expertise around how to actually be an agent. And we have

some of the best trainers, some of the best coaches in the entire industry. And for the most part, some of the most top producing teams in the industry. So regardless of sort of where you're at in your career, there is a place for you to come and learn. And, that is super powerful. And I think something that's really overlooked by a lot of agents in our industry. Yeah, 100%. That brings me to the Groundup USA. Tell me, because that's like all about construction data.

I'm a data geek. Obviously, being an AI, I believe that AI is powerless without the correct, the right data. And so tell me a little bit, what is that? And how can we use that as agents? So, okay. The ground up is not. as it didn't start as sophisticated as AI-driven data, I'll be honest. It was one of my best friends who works for developers directly, he works for a development firm

on the construction side. And one of the biggest issues in South Florida, we've now found that this is ever. But one of the biggest issues in South Florida, if you're an agent trying to sell preconstruction projects, is that it's really hard to get the information for all the projects, and there are hundreds of them. So if a buyer calls you and says, hey, Felix, I'm from Montreal. really want to buy a second home in Miami. I'm looking for a new construction project, $1 million to $1.5, two bedrooms at least. I want to be close to the ocean within 10 minute walk

between West Palm Beach and Miami. I don't really know. You're like, oh, great, you just named like 300 projects. Like, how am I supposed to filter through all this? And they're not on the MLS for the most part. The marketing brochures, the materials aren't there. So as an agent, what a lot of people have tried to replicate but found really hard is to create a portal or a website where all of the luxury reconstruction projects are listed. Your challenge is that that data changes weekly. And in order to get that data, it's really challenging because most projects don't even put their marketing brochures or their unbranded materials on their website because they want you to call the in-house representative. They want you to register your client. They want you to do all these things before

they even give you the information. It started as a selfish need for me and my team to want to be hyper-competitive. I saw a gap. I saw how we could set ourselves apart from the competition. And so Marco and I started putting the ground up together, which was meant to just be a really simple map and a really simple website with the downloadable marketing brochures, the pictures of every single project, all the information you would need, square footage, bedroom sizes, blueprints, architect, designers, all that kind of stuff that your client, like high-end client will want. And we were like, oh my God, this is so freaking hard and so time-consuming. And I don't even know if it's worth it anymore. We were freaking they're trying to build it on square space. And so I was in a WhatsApp group

with like 500 pre-construction agents in South Florida. I've been in for a very long time. And so I just threw it out there. Like once we had the beta version of it, that was really janky and missing half the projects. I was like, guys, this is what I'm building. Does anybody have any thoughts? Like, am I going somewhere with this?

Would you guys use this? This is really complicated. Do you know of anything like this? And we just started getting blown up by messages. Every single agent was like, oh my God, this is amazing. How do I use it? Where do I get it?

This is exactly what I'm looking for. And it got so intense that the owner of that group chat ended up kicking me out because she thought I was like selling their people and I was like, I don't have a business yet. It wasn't called the ground. It was called the name of my real estate team, Vita Luxury Group. So it was just a subpage. And I had used all these different providers for websites that I'm sure a lot of agents have heard of.

And I was asking them to do this for me. And they were like, yeah, right. Like you're going to have to pay me like 20 grand in order for me to get every project on your website. Once I saw there was a need, we built that platform, which is the ground up USA. We built it on Squarespace. It was super simple to use at every single project. It still does. We update it weekly. It has news, analytics, all the data that a pre-construction

agent needs because, like you said, data is so important. And for me, what sets you apart as an agent, what really puts you in that expert level is knowledge of your market and knowledge of the numbers. You'd be surprised how many agents have no idea what's going on, even in their local community half the time. They don't know that the listing down the streets sold. They don't know. They're not keeping up with the metrics of their neighborhood. But pre-construction space specifically, if you can have an educated conversation with a buyer where you showcase your expertise, you know all your numbers, you know your data, you know your projects, that sets you aside. And so we started off as a membership, paid membership where you pay a certain amount of month in order to get access to the platform. And then we pivoted and the Miami Association of

Realtors, which I think is like the second largest association in the U.S. reached out to us and said they wanted to offer it to all their agents. So we gave it to them completely for free, actually. And now every single agent in Miami has access to the ground of USA, to all the information. And we have an eye frame capability where you can showcase, take the eye frame of all the projects, put it on your own personal Felix bravo real estate.com website on a pre-construction tab. So when a client says, hey, send me a little information about you, here's my website. And on my website, if it's a KD core website, let's say, I don't think you have an IDX with all the MLS stuff, but there's a pre-construction tab where you can find every single project in Miami and that data lives in your CRM.

So that's a, that's a little bit of our project for the ground up. It's more of a passion project. We're not on Squarespace anymore. We've graded a little bit, but it's still just two guys we're really passionate. Three now, we're really passionate about the industry and love what we do. And we don't, I promise you we don't make money off the ground up. So we gave it away for free to the association and we're happy to do so. And we get so much feedback from the agents, how much they love it.

So if anybody's interested, feel free to reach out. I'll put you in touch with some of the people there. That's awesome. Do you have any AI implemented into it yet? because one thing I know you talk about agents that don't stay up to date on, you know, what's going on in their own community. How about the agents that do, but still don't freaking understand what they're even reading, let alone have the ability to communicate it properly to their clients in a way that they'll understand?

That's where I find one of the major advantages of implementing AI into any of these systems is the ability to translate it for us and read the data. in ways that we can't, right? We haven't implemented AI. We're not unfortunately carrying none of us and are smart as you when it comes to AI, so we might have to pin you on that a little bit. We do have, you know,

analytics and data tables that are really easy to use. I honestly have no idea of their AI driven. I don't think they are. But that'd be an interesting conversation to have because we have people with all the data. All about the data, right? Yeah. Okay, so now like, okay, so we go from there.

And now you are BP of growth, international growth for EXP. We have your leading 22 countries. Like where, what have we opened up? What does EXP opened up most recently? And what's in the plans to open up over the next year in terms of countries? Because, you know, for any of you agents out there that are listening, that are interested in international attraction, you know, maybe you can start planning ahead. Yeah, absolutely.

we're into 22 markets outside of US and Canada, so those are 24 international markets. We haven't actually opened up a new market since I think January 23. So this year would be the first year that we're back into that sort of expansion mode. I think we grew really, really quickly, and then we sort of stabilized the business a little bit, focused on growing in the markets that we're in, maturing our markets quite a bit. And now we're operationalizing to grow to, Glenn will say, 100 markets in five years. So that's no pressure on our team there pushing for. At the moment, we've got four markets that were actively.

opening, three of which have been announced, which is Turkey, Egypt, and Peru. There's one more that we haven't announced yet, and I won't drop it here because I want to make sure that for legal requirements were good, but we're super excited about it. And I think everybody will get really excited because it's one of the, to give a hint, it's in that top five markets. So you can do some math there and figure it up. But Turkey, Egypt, Peru, we're super pumped up about. We went through a really intensive process of finding the right leaders, finding the right group. And We've kind of gone back to the basics a little bit on the international side where when we enter a new market, we go in and say, EXP already brings that cherry on the top, which is ref share equity, virtual brokerage.

Like, that's great. That's amazing. That is what makes us a big part of who we are. Really, we're in the brokerage game. Like, we're in the game of helping agents sell in real estate. That is the number one thing that's most important to us. And so when we go into one of these markets, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of an agent in Egypt or in Istanbul or in Lima and say, what is an agent? in Lima need in order to be competitive in their market, in order to sell more properties,

and in order to have the back-end platform that will support them to grow their business. And so we localize best-in-class technology, best-in-class portals, best-in-class lead generators, best-in-class training. I mean, we go in and localize our entire business. And then I've shared equity, being international, independent, like all these things that we have becomes this cherry on the top, which is really what that side of the business is. because we're in the game of helping agents sell more homes, and that kind of blows up from there. So we're really excited.

I think Turkey, Egypt, and surprise caught a lot of people by how much opportunity there is there. We have some amazing partners. I'll be in Egypt on Sunday, actually, with Ahmed Elbatrawi, our country leader there, who runs the Arab L.S, which we're super excited about. So we're partnering with him, and we're sort of bringing in that professionalism and regulations to the international real estate market that has been missing for quite a long time. And we're really focused on partnering with agents who want to provide a more professional service to their clients because internationally, a lot of these markets are just hyper unregulated and don't have a lot of rules. And that creates a function where local business owners kind of take advantage or gain the system quite a bit.

And a lot of times it's at the downfall of the local agent. And so we're providing a different platform for them that in most markets don't exist. So we're super excited. I think 100 countries in five years is doable for sure. and we're excited about doing it. We're growing so fast that sooner rather than later, there will be more agents outside of North America for EXP than there currently are. International is the future of EXP.

And I think regardless of what market you're in, given how we're borderless and limitless, you have the opportunity to take advantage of that to help build something for yourself in the future. So we're super excited about everything that's happening. And I feel really lucky that I'm in the seat that I'm in. That's amazing. For agents that are interested in attracting in a country, that's already open, like Mexico or I think Columbia is open.

What would be, I feel like connecting with the country leader, would that be probably the best step for them once they have an idea of who they want to bring into their organization? What do you think? So we have, I mean, in every single country, we'll have a country leader. And you can think of them as like a state broker, for example. And we also have in country staff transactions on boarded marketing. Some countries might be larger than others because they're just more mature than others. But you can definitely reach out to the country leaders and talk to them about your ambitions.

If you have contacts in that country, they'll help you and guide you through that process, especially if you're not necessarily familiar with how real estate or organized real estate works in that market. We have launched a co-sponsorship program, which I don't know if it's been announced or not Gary, but whatever we're so. Glenn always says if you're not asking for forgiveness, at least twice, once every two weeks, you're not trying hard on it. So I guess we'll see if I'm going to do this one. But one of the challenges is if I'm in Miami and I want to sponsor an agent in Madrid, Spain, how do I support them really? It's hard because real estate in Spain is just so different.

And the way real estate is done is a whole different process. I mean, they have, they don't have unlesses. They have open listings versus exclusive listings. Like there's all these nuances that are really specific to each market. And so what we've created is an opportunity for you to go to, if you have an agent in Spain, to go and find who's already like the top. a tractor in Spain. Who's a good business partner for me? Like, who's selling a lot of homes? Who's been an EXP agent for some time? Maybe it's, you know, John. Let's go talk to John and see

if we can form a partnership where we can co-sponsor this agent and they'll exist in both our lines and help them and support them. I think that is a game changer for international and I think it's a game changer for agents as well because we continue to break down the silos around us. And we already have this extremely collaborative process and a collaborative community. and this just opens it up to more and more people. So I think there's a fear to attract internationally because you're like, man, I don't even know how to help them. Like, yeah, maybe I'm really good at talking about personal branding.

But if somebody, like, called me from New Zealand was like, man, I love your personal branding coaching. Like, I'm going to join EXP in New Zealand. I'd be like, I have no idea. How's the whole house in New Zealand? How do I help you, right? And now you can go out and find who's one of our top agents in New Zealand and co-sponsored them together. It doesn't change anything for you and your downlines week. We'll announce a little bit more about it.

I think soon, I think at EXPCon Canada. So I don't know when this podcast comes out. Hopefully I didn't get himself in trouble there. But I'm really excited about it. That's so awesome. Okay, so I have, I do a little bit of attraction just so you know it wasn't my focus for the first year. I'm shifting more into it, leading more into it because I'm naturally getting more attention

and people are just coming to me. So I find that they're coming to me because I'm traveling internationally speaking about AI. And I'm meeting international people. Like I'm meeting, I was speaking at the parliament in Rome in the summer and then I was Portugal and, you know, I'm Iceland. I was teaching a class in Iceland. So I'm attracting people that want to grow their business internationally. So if a country isn't open and this is usually the case, they travel or have a home in another country and that's why they want to join EXP because they want to, you know, practice. it's in both areas or grow in both areas? And if the country is not open, what would be the steps

for them to take other than contact me? That's a great question. It's probably the most common question I get all the times. How do we open up a country? The way we open up countries is it's not like I pull up this map and go, this one's next or like throw a dart at a map or something. We listen to our agents. So the demand comes from you guys. Like if I start Egypt, for example, I mean, I had like 12 different people who were like, I've got these contacts in Egypt. You should come listen to them, talk to them. And so we started kind of having those conversations with all the people in Egypt who were interested in EXB. And what you'll find is some people, once they find out more about EXP, maybe it's not for them, maybe it is.

But once we kind of find that alignment of a country leader, we understand the market. We understand that our model can be successful there, disruptive, et cetera. And we find an alignment with a leader of boots on the ground. And that country leader avatar is so, so important for us. You look at like Adam Day, for example, who opened up the UK and now overseas all of Europe and India, had this experience of being a real estate agent or a state agent, as they would call it, who would get mad at me for calling him a realtor, an estate agent, then opening up his own estate agency and then, you know, attracting agents. He understands how to operate in that market.

And he was really sold on the vision of EXP. So once we meet that person, then everything gets a lot easier. If we have the right team in place, everything, every challenge that comes after that is just something that we can tackle together. So if you have contacts in a certain market that we're not in, send them to a conversation with either Carrie first and then come to me and have a conversation. And I'm always happy to meet anybody that I can from from international markets. I probably do two or three a day, honestly, meeting people who are in markets who are not currently in. And we start building that list of like, hey, what countries should we jump into? You know, we can't open up 30 countries in a year right now.

But as we continue to grow and operationalize our systems, we can open up more countries per year. And so we start already in mind. We have three or four countries that we think we know we have demand in. And so we're kind of after this next cohort of countries open, what comes next and what comes next. And we'll just continue to open up more and more markets. So that's a little bit about our process. It's a lot easier than I made it sound. Just reach out to me.

It was great. We'll figure everything out. We'll have a conversation with whoever your contact. are and go from there. Well, you know, you mentioned that you can't do a lot as of right now at once, but like, I'm going to argue that you can. And I'm going to connect with you after this, because like with the launch, launch of like deep research and the pro model of chat GPT, that's expensive. But you can really dive deep and do all your research into every location very quickly. The accuracy is so much, like I'm telling you, like Felix, this would blow your

mind what they have going on right now. And just having AI to a lot of the heavy lifting for you might speed things up too. We use a we use chat GPT for literally. We use AI for whatever. Everyone on the team on the staff side has an enterprise GPT account. We make custom GPTs like we do a lot of our research in GPT is like our best friend. They're probably our hardworking employee that we have at this company is GP. Um, and when I say that, we can't open up a ton of countries. It's not that we don't have the capacity to is that we've created a new process of how we open up countries now that I think might feel slightly slower than it did in the past. But what you'll see is that the growth of the country once it's

open will be exponentially better than it was previously because we're setting them up for success in the back end during this process. And I think we're we've sort of as a team, You know, we haven't opened up countries in two years. We're sort of like some of us hadn't ever opened up the market at EXP. Some of us hadn't done it in a couple years. We've built this new process together. Glenn, our founder, has stepped into international six months. He's been leading the charge on that.

We've really built this awesome process where now we can operationally successfully open up a multitude of markets in a year. I think he said 20 at EXPCon at one point. We could open up 20 markets in countries in one year, which we're building the team that can do that. We're definitely leveraging AI, if it was. wasn't for AI. I'm not sure we could pull that off. But I think over the next three or four years, you will just see every single year will open up more and more markets than we did the year private. Yeah, that's, that's amazing. I love it. What would you say is, first of all, is it true? Because when I was in Europe, I heard that most eight European agents, like,

forget about the U.S. and Canada. God knows a large, too large of a percentage that do not use CRMs at all. Okay. But I feel like when you go international, that just, you know, the percentage of adoption just going down. Is that accurate? Is that accurate? Yes and no. What you'll find in a lot of international markets is that I could wake up today and say, I'm an agent. And I could call the portal of my market, whatever the zillow of my market is and say, hey, I'd like to list some properties. So I don't even have to join brokerage. So a lot of those independent agents, they a lot of times don't have the coaching or training to go out and build a real business. It's just a psychic, sort of, so to speak. And that's where we've taken a different stance. So I think what you'll see is every agent at EXP across international uses our CRM platforms because they're connected to the portals. They're connected to their listings, to their backend systems.

And so we're really, really, I think we used to have a platform called Rep, which was our all in one sort of CRM for all these countries. And then we realized a lot of times we were bringing in foreign technology to these markets and agents weren't adapting well to foreign CRMs. A lot of these countries already had CRMs that really worked well with the systems and countries. We've gone out and identified those and brought them in as what is the number one local CRM. So it's the wild, wild west compared to the U.S. for sure in a lot of markets,

and some are more regulated than others. But our agents at the XP International are that top 10% of agents in their market who really want to professionalize their business, see themselves as entrepreneurs, and want to build a system that is scalable. And so they're leveraging our systems. We do have a fixer AI, if you're familiar with it. I did. Which is a, I mean, the bane of any realtor's existence is checking their inbox 24-7

and fixer AI almost acts as like an executive assistant for you internally and organizes your inbox. And it also starts to learn from your conversations and prompt answers before, without you even having to sort of read through that chain. And I think eventually that can transform into a CRM type of tool where agents won't even have to log into the CRM unless it's to push out listings or something like that. So internationally, the CRM is what a lot of is what all of our agents use to push out their listings to the portal, which is why they kind of have to use it. But I think we're we're teaching a lot of these markets how we use CRMs in ways to grow our business and we'll continue to get more adoptability. I have a question for you.

What if I could recommend an AI tool that was a voice activated CRM that could be used in any language? With an awful to the international agents in terms of like for systemizing them and also for agent attraction as well. Yeah. I mean, that sounds really cool. I'd like to send you something after this. I'll email you something to watch. It's pretty lengthy because the tool is pretty robust. But yeah, I'm going to send that to you.

I'll definitely check it out. What I will say is that like any tool for agents in general, I think even for me when I was an agent, you can get so, I tried every CRA. Like I've done chine, follow up boss before. Yeah. Sugar. Use Salesforce in the past. I've used HubSpot for different things.

I've used Monday.com for maybe not necessarily real estate for other type of stuff. You really just have to find the tools that work for you and that align the goals that you have, more than anything, because it's so easy. so quick to get overwhelmed because if you just do one Google search, you'll find like thousands. And they all claim to do different things. So you have to find the one that works best for you. A lot of people aren't adapting AI into their day-to-day life because it's overwhelming and scary or their fear of it. And I think that's definitely changed. AI is changing quicker than any other technology. Like the way I always try to explain AI is like remember when cell phones were like these

big boxes and it took a little bit for them to turn into like these really small. things. But once, like, the cell phone was a small tool in your hand. And all of a sudden, five years later, you got, like, the razor and then you had the Blackberry and then you had the iPhone. And then cell phones just completely changed from being a way for you to communicate with your friends to like a full-blown computer and access to the entire world's information really quickly. Like within a decade, it happened. AI is doing that like every single month. That level of progression is happening like month over month and it's really crazy. It really only takes a couple of days of you paying attention and playing the couple tools for you to get back

on track and kind of up to speed with what's going on. So I think our agents, what you'll find is that EXP attracts like tech forward agents and agents who want to explore it. So any tool you do have, that sounds amazing. I'd love to get in front of it. And I'd love to share it with our agents because we're constantly just sharing with them. Hey, this is what we're doing. We build custom dpDs and then share it with the agents internationally and say like, hey, this is what we built. Do you guys want to play with it? I've got some tricks too for custom dbDs because I've been building them now for almost two years and I've got some pretty sick tips around them that can build some amazing stuff. So I want to show that that to you. I'll definitely send that over to you. Actually,

Glenn's, I think, been looking at it since Christmas already. And when is it so advanced. He loved, I love having a conversation with him about AI. Whenever I see him anywhere, he'll just be like, Carrie, check out the, have you heard of this tool, like check those. So I do the same thing with him. And we're just like, yeah, we're just sharing. I joke glad that he's keeping me young because he's so ahead of all the AI tools. And he's keeping me up to speed with what's going on. So it's been a fun challenge trying to keep up with him. And I think that's trickled to the entire organization to all the teams and even all the agents now.

Everybody's incorporating AI. So you're sort of spearheaded a lot of that, I think, Harry, and opened up a lot of eyes who maybe normally would have been like, I don't know if I could do that. Like, I'm not very techie. and you have a good way of explaining it to people where just anybody can get it, which I think is a really powerful tool. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, we're going to leave out on this note.

Give me the one tech tool that you cannot live without. I'm going to cop out and say GPT, but I'll try to think of something else because I'm just using chat GPT for absolutely everything. But like my day-to-day life, like I don't use Google anymore. I just use chat GPT for everything. I ask you questions. So, for me, that's. I love that answer, Felix. and that is not a cop-out, because if you understand how to use AI at a very high level,

that is the only thing you need is a very robust LLM, large language model, like chat GPT. I've decided to branch out of my comfort zone because Chad GPT has been the Holy Grail for me of AI. But I'm branching out. I'm looking at Gemini. I'm looking at Groch because I like the fact that, you know, it's trained on tweets, and I think it's going to have more personality for some things. I'm really going to look at obviously like deep seek, but there's no, there's no fun or enjoying interface that does anything, you know,

like chat GPT does. So that has no luster for me. But just really figuring out which tools and which all elms do what the best. So that's like my next like hat project because like this is all I do. Yeah, I even ask Shad GBT to recommend AIs for me All the time. I'm like, hey, here's what I'm working on And then what AI should I be looking into that could help me with a specific

So it's become My search engine more than anything else. Like I don't just build projects on it. It really has become my access to anything I need. I feel like it's a cop-out because it's the one everyone says. But it is probably what I found if you're a beginner, it's not just go in chat GBT and like ask it, who is Felix Bravo?

or like, tell me a story. Like, you can do stupid stuff. It's silly, a little fun. But you could start, now that they have that, what's it called folders or projects, I can't remember that new tool. You can just, you can do so much more than you'd expect. And it's so simple. Like, it's the easiest one to use and understand because it feels like Google half the time.

Just Googling things. Like, if you read it like Google, all of a sudden, you'd get the click of the power of GPT. So for me, that's, I can't live without it. I think I'd have a panic attack if I didn't have it at this point. So we're, we're, we and GPT is like, if Jen, my significant other, she says like, oh, you know, she asked me a question. What should we do? Or where should we go?

I'm just like, oh, just ask the chat. Chat. Go ask chat. You'll figure it out. Yeah. I got a couple tricks for you because I'm not sure if you know us, but chat. GBT launch tasks. Okay.

So one of the things I do is every end of month for my own business. I tell it how the month went. Did I meet my goals? What changed in my business? What new campaigns did I start? anything significant, right, that happened that month. And then I tell it my goals for next month. And then I set a task and I set the task to look like this.

Considering my goals for the next month and what I achieved last month, give me a list of tasks and KPIs that I can conquer over the next week that will get me closer to my goals faster. And so every Monday morning, I get an alert sent to my email. I open it up and it opens up. up in my chat GPT conversation with my list of to do's for the week. And then I have a second task set for Fridays to follow up with me on any, you know, what would happen this week?

Did you get everything done? You know, basically like a check-in, right? And then that's automatic and it's automated and it flows nicely. So that's something that you can implement. I absolutely love it. It's almost like, you know, I'm a big fan. Like if you watch my content, I'm a big fan of customizing chat GPT and really teaching it about your business and the best way to do that is like check in with it.

Maybe on a daily basis, I have friends that treat it like a journal and there's is customized to how like I've never seen anything like that. But weekly for sure. And then another thing I did was I created, I asked Chad GPT to do deep research on a CFO. I want the top performing CFO. in the US. I want to know what their, how they think, what their qualifications are, that, you know, everything about them. Now take that and build that into custom instructions for custom GPT. Oh, you have somebody. And it could be for anything. I just chose the finance area

because that's not really my strength, right? It could be for any area of your business. And now you have like an expert advisor that you don't have to pay. So yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. treat Shat GBT like your business partner. Yeah, absolutely. It doesn't have this be one. I mean, it could be your CFO. It could be your chief strategy officer really easily. I think GBT will be the chief strategy officer of most companies at some point.

It sounds scary or weird, but it's just the reality of how powerful it was getting. Absolutely. Felix, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast and any way that I can support you. And international, I know I've offered before, but I'll rather reach out to you. with a couple of things after this is over. And I appreciate you. Thank you so much. Of course. Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure. And I'm excited to continue to. Thanks for listening to everything they never told you about real estate. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. To connect with Carrie or for more information about her coaching

program, check out Carriesove.com or at Carrie Sovey and Associates on Instagram and TikTok. Thanks again for tuning in. and we'll see you next time.