KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Navigating Real Estate Trends & Industry Shifts with Andre LaFountain

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Summary:Join real estate veteran Andre LaFountain, with over 32 years in the industry, as he shares his unparalleled expertise in navigating the ever-evolving real estate trends and industry shifts. This episode dives into the mindset and strategies required to excel in dynamic markets, from his days as a top listing agent in New York to his current role leading a massive agent organization with eXp Realty. Discover actionable insights on consistency, agent attraction, and leveraging an adaptive approach to build lasting success.Bullet Point TakeawaysDecades of Market Navigation: Learn from Andre LaFountain's over three decades of experience, having excelled through various market cycles since starting at age 22, including owning a top agency and consistently selling hundreds of homes annually.The Power of Consistency in Agent Attraction: Discover Andre's proven methods for consistent agent attraction efforts, emphasizing the importance of a growth mindset, genuine value-add, and disciplined habits to expand your real estate business.Identifying & Capitalizing on Industry Shifts: Gain insights into how Andre recognized the disruptive potential of new models like eXp Realty, understanding that adapting to and embracing innovative changes is crucial for long-term competitiveness.Data-Driven Business Forward Movement: Understand the significance of managing your CRM effectively, identifying key performance indicators (KPIs), and leveraging lead generation strategies that are within your control to propel your business forward.From Top Agent to Coaching Leader: Hear how Andre's experience as a #1 Listing Agent and later as a National Sales Director & Coach shaped his ability to not only achieve personal production but also help hundreds of other agents elevate their businesses.Topics:Andre LaFountain Real EstateReal Estate Trends 2025 (or current year)Navigating Market ShiftsReal Estate Industry ChangesAgent Attraction StrategiesCall-to-Action:Ready to strategically navigate real estate trends and industry shifts? Listen to the full episode on your favorite podcast platform and gain Andre LaFountain's expert insights!

Seven-figure success starts when you start thinking like a CEO. Welcome to the John Kitchens Coach podcast experience. This is your host, John Kitchens. Get ready to think bigger and transform your business into a path to lasting freedom. Andrew, the fountain in the house with us today. I'm Jay, welcome. Thanks, guys. Appreciate you.

Man, we do have a lot to jump into. Should we change the name of the podcast today to one big dumpster fire? Oh, man. You know, we can kind of canterball anywhere we want to go. but it was interesting. So Delprey, which, you know, Jay, you turned me on to Mike Delprey's information. His newsletter comes out and he's always got just some just fire information in there. Just a lot of great stuff.

And last week, his newsletter was about the information of Rocket acquiring Redfin. And he breaks down a lot of things in there and things that. that he mentions and talks about something that all of us have been chasing, you know, especially, you know, in conversations when, when teams were starting to become a thing and really,

that was kind of the direction and where things that were at in the industry. And all of our conversation was always around, how do we control the consumer experience, right? The holy grail to be able to be a one-stop shop. And that's really what his newsletter was kind of breaking down and showing. And where all. all the moves that are being made, where is the direction, where are things going, who's doing what?

Redfin, you know, obviously with Rocket making the move with Redfin, then you hear, you know, chatters of what's Compass going to do, what's Berkshire doing. And then you start to start to think about it and start playing some, hmm, what if scenarios here, you know, who's going to be navigating, where are things going. So I would love to just, let's just jump in right there because we're starting to see some moves, It's things that we've been talking about for years. And it's really starting to play out. You know, legacy brands, obviously what Gary did with, you know, the money.

And it's just interesting to see and navigating into the second half of the decade. New, you know, new administration. It's just really wild what's happening right now in just on the planet. But real estate, you know, business and real estate in general. I love to get y'all's take. Just kind of as we're starting to see people starting to make some moves. I have some opinions. I should probably start with a full legal disclosure.

These are my opinions, not the opinions of any of EXP or any of our affiliates, affiliated companies. But yeah, no, I mean, I've always been fascinated with Glenn Kelman. Like, that dude, I mean, he rode that train as long and as hard as you could ride that train, the race to the bottom, you know, trying to be the cheapest. You know, the consumer wants, you know, they don't want the lowest, I think it's just proof. First of all, let's just call a spade of spade. That cell was not a win. It was basically sold for parts, which is what he said he didn't want to do. They bought that for the technology. That's that's the move. They'll probably do nothing with the real estate. It was just a bad model. They were here in the Friscoe market. They did a lot of volume. They just never made money. I mean, it never, you know, they tried to go after the listing side at one point. Didn't work. They were doing billboards all over all over the cities they were in. Didn't work. It's just, you know, there's always going to be a certain number of consumers.

You know, there's always going to be somebody that'll buy, you know, the four tires for 100 bucks, right? Like there's always someone that wants the cheapest, but that's just not, you know, that's not, it's a segment of the market that's always existed, always will exist. I just wouldn't try to build a business around that trying to be the cheapest. So yeah, so seeing that didn't really shock me. I thought it was a smart move by Rocket because they had, you know, that what they did do right at Redfin was they built some badass tech. So, you know, now they're in the portal game. and they're a legitimate competitor in the space as it relates to that. So, yeah, interesting, you know, not super shocking, interesting, you know, not a win.

That dude, you know, he was very interesting if you ever watched him speak. I mean, he's just dead set that this is what the consumer wants. And they spent billions of dollars trying to prove that and were proved wrong. Yeah. They actually did the opposite of everything we've been, you know, taught and learned. about how to build a successful business. You know, they, number one, they took, they took the cheaper route, went after the consumer that was looking for the, to save a buck, and also hired the lowest skilled labor to do it,

which is agents that, you know, it's arguable to say that the highest talent in our business, they're not in that, not the discount model. They're charging a higher fee because they can, they can command it. it because they're providing a level of expertise that's beyond your average agent. Right. So, you know, Glenn took the route of going and dipping below that. And I'm not saying that all red, infant agents are bad, or low skilled.

All I'm saying is that the highest talent among agents is not going to go working, you know, working for a flat salary fee where they have to be in meetings. And actually, a redfin agent local to us over here, recently came over. And this was actually about six months ago. And six months ago, he was saying that Redfin, this is before any talks of them being acquired, was actually changing their model from a, from a, a salaried position agent to a full commissioned agent. And he's like, but they're still going to expect me to do all the same things, all the same meetings, be at this, be at that, run around like a like a W-2 employee. And he's like, I'm out. I'm out before that

happens. So, you know, it's, it's interesting that they, they survived as long as they did and grew, but it was because of the tech. And like you had said, Jay, they sold it for parts. He didn't want to sell it for parts. I would have to believe, do you guys know what the highest valuation that Redfin ever hit was it? It was, I want to say it was 10 billion. 10 billion. Yeah. Sold for 1.7 billion all stock. I have to believe that's a loss. That's an hell. That's not what Glenn intended when, you know, when he was starting and growing and trying to scale that business. So wish him best of luck. Hope he's got enough to, you know, retire and live a good life off of whatever. But he's got stock. He's got to catch that stock in. It's not what he wanted.

Yeah. I talked to a Redfin agent a few weeks back and they sound pretty nervous about what they thought might have been changing and, and what, what they thought might have been changing. and I wasn't sure what they were going to do either. Like you guys said, I would rather much, the real estate industry is the best industry out there that you can get paid what you're worth, right? And if you provide the value to the client and the customer, why would you want, in my opinion, you know, get paid a small salary and when you can just provide really, really, really good value and get paid, you know, what's your worth and provide your value. right what are you what are we thinking or seeing kind of as as possible next next moves right just kind of from a thought experiment just kind of thinking through things because obviously you know we touched touched on you know the move that gary made with kw so what what are the legacy brands what what are their moves to be able to yeah i mean i mean i mean there's

You know, the, you know, I think this is funny, you know, it is funny. You know, the, the anywhere brand, which is basically, in my opinion, like, that's, you should be anywhere, but at one of those brands. They're, they're all locked into this model. So is KW. They're locked into a franchise model. Even Gary tried to go and create virtual brokerage. And then lawsuits came up and, you know, there's, you can't, you can't sell a virtual, you know, you can't have an agent to go to a virtual Keller Williams if you sold a franchise in that same territory. So Gary's been trying to compete with us since the 20,

was it the 2018 vision speech where he mentioned the XP 21 times. He was our number one recruiter at EXP that year because we only had 8,000 agents and nobody even knew, nobody knew who we were. We were not even on the map yet, but we were making noise. And he put us on the map. And he knew that it was going to be difficult, but he knew if he couldn't compete with revenue share and our model, that they, that they, we're dead in the water. And so when I see, you know, it's not good or bad. It just is what it is.

If you sold your, you know, private company that you built up for all these years in the worst market we've seen since 1995, that's a deal you wouldn't normally do. You would wait five years until the market's better and the numbers are up unless you believe that your agent count is at the highest it's ever going to be and that you realize you're not really going to be able to compete in the new, you know, the new marketplace of being cloud-based brokerages. So, you know, that's, you know, that to me, they're all kind of locked in to, you know, their models and, you know, their agent counts are suffering. You can look across all these, all these legacy brands, and they're all losing agents, largely because the value props hire at, you know, at EXP and

some of our competitors that are in the space as cloud-based. So, so, yeah, I don't know what they do, you know, it's like organizing chairs on the Titanic, in my opinion. I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to be, you know, at the helm of one of those companies for sure. What's funny is I was listening to a podcast. I think you listen to the same podcast, Jay. We're not going to mention names, but it was very interesting listening to a gentleman who was kind of defending these legacy brands, namely, you know, kind of Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, which I don't know if you'd call it a legacy brand, but they're a legacy model.

It's an iconic brand for sure. It's an iconic brand, but I'm talking about the real estate sector of it home services specifically. And there's so many different layers to all the different franchises and who owns what. And it's so complex and so complicated.

The funny part about the comment that was made on the podcast is that he was insinuating that the new, the cloud base that usually typically has a leadership group at the top or one leader, that drives things such as a Glenn or a Leo or a, you know, Sharon, which I know we're going to talk about, that that's a weakness to us and that these legacy brands that have the franchises

with many leaders that you don't hear about, that's their strength. And he couldn't even describe the value proposition of Berkshire. Since when Berkshire Hathaway, I guess kind of acquired all the credentials. And a lot of my friends that were at Prudential were acquired and they were all excited about it. They're excited about having Berkshire Hathaway on their sign. I thought to myself, you know, 50% of Americans do not own stock and don't even have any kind of inclination of what Berkshire or Hathaway, why there's significance to that. 50%. The other 50% know. The other 50% do not know. I'm not seeing how that's a competitive advantage. Century 21 has a bigger brand name,

even though they're archaic at this point. They have a bigger brand name when it comes to like Kleenex on tissues, right, than Berkshire Hathaway, home services does. They weren't able, not one person was able, even still to this day, to explain to me, what is your competitive advantage? Explain to me in 30. Which is ironic. Why do you create to grow their business on your platform? They couldn't explain it.

Right. It's ironic because Berkshire Hathaway, and one of the things Warren Buffett says is one of the first things he looks at in buying any company is their durable, competitive advantage in the marketplace. That's one of the main things that he looks at. And so to hear, you know, and I didn't realize this, but they picked up that deal with Prudential. The real estate wasn't the focus. That was something that came with it.

It wasn't the focus of the deal. And so they really probably didn't want to get in the real estate space. They just ended up in the real estate space when they bought Prudential. And so, you know, but yeah, I mean, and this all comes down to what we've talked about for years, which is who manages the customer experience? The only value in a brand is if you actually control and manage the customer experience. And no real estate company other than Redfin who tried to do it for less, which ironically, they didn't have any competition because nobody wanted to compete with that.

It's difficult to be profitable in that space as it is. But to control the consumer experience, and we did attempt to try to do it as best as it could be done in our own marketplace and controlling the consumer experience. it's like Jay-Z says, I'm not a businessman. I am the businessman. The real estate agent is the brand. And that's what EXP gets. It's brokered by EXP. You can buy Dill, you can buy Microsoft, you're powered by EXP. And that's by Intel and that example. And so these brands don't bring any value to the table because you could go to any one of those brands, ours included, and have a good experience or a bad experience. Because the agent controls the experience. And so there is no value. in the brand. And so if there is, if there, maybe they lock down some, some, some, you know,

a business unit that they, that they control. Well, what are they doing? They're, they're monetizing that through the agent on a 40% referral fee. So it's not where you want to build your business. That's for sure as an agent. And I think most agents, most agents I talk to, even the, even the ones that haven't been doing it that long, realized that, yeah, I ain't getting anything from the company. You know, I don't, how many deals did you close last year that came from your brand? Right. Yeah. Some of the newer ones, my, even the newer ones, may say, well, yeah, I use the brand when I'm explaining my value proposition as part of that. But as soon as you realize that you don't need that, you're going to wherever you have the,

what is the best platform for you to build your business? What creates the best, what's the best vehicle for you to get to your financial goals? That's what agents are looking for. And, you know, I think that, you know, the last 10 years, if you look at how much money came and trying to disrupt the real estate agent and replace them, I mean, Zillow put more money into it than anybody. and they said, forget it. We'll just do flex and we're going to give leads to the best agents in every marketplace. And that's how we're going to monetize this thing.

It's very difficult to control the entire experience and not have a great real estate agent in the middle. And so, you know, I think, you know, there's less money going after replacing the real estate agent at this point. You know, when you look at the new companies that are popping up, where do purple bricks go? I don't see them anywhere. They came in. They said, we don't want no part of this. They left the industry. So it is fascinating.

watch but these legacy brands are in a bad spot they don't control the brand they don't control the experience and so the company that agents are going to gravitate to or where where is the opportunity the biggest for them yeah they all have their time right i mean sears and and kemart they all have their time but um things have changed and if you're not changing with uh with what's going on around you you're going to be in trouble right so no i i love what you said right there And just kind of thinking through more kind of, you know, who's going to make the next moves, right? And they may just not even touch the legacy stuff. That might, they all might just sunset, right?

As the agents die off and that just might be their path. But if you look at all the cloud-based models that are out there, I mean, what are the couple dozen now that are of that model? What are their plans? Like, where do they, how do they compete? how do they stay relevant? I mean, you can't run on fumes for very long. You can't give away everything for free. And so like what are we, obviously we have our crystal balls out here. What are we anticipating kind of looking as moves are being made? Things are shifting around, you know, over the next three, four, five years. I'm really glad. I'm really glad I'm at EXP. I think the

opportunity in front of EXP is the biggest of all of all companies. And we can get in into why, you know, the runway is so cleared. The path has been cleared for us and the competitors in our space in terms of cloud-based. But yeah, it's, I don't see any other opportunity other than, than EXP being twice as big as it is now, maybe three times as big as it is right now. Yeah, when you talk about, we were talking about brand and, you know, arguably Remax has built a super strong, you know, branding name. I don't know too many people. If you said the word remax, they're not, they're not going to connect that to, you know, a real estate brokerage. Same thing with Century 21.

What I find is interesting is that as you alluded to earlier, Jay, you know, back when I was with Remax, they, you know, I think they got up to about 110 agents somewhere. It was like 110, 110, 127. They're under 60,000 agents. They're at 58,000 agents. That's a huge dip, 50% you know, in the hole on agent count. I don't know what that equates to with the franchises, but I would not want to be a remex franchise salesperson. Well, you never would want to own a remax franchise because you were just a landlord.

So they used to be the cheapest. That's where you went. If you were, you know, a top dog, you went to remax and they, you know, they carved out that space. But as long as you had a. a lot of agents, you know, you could make a little bit of money. But what you find right now is most of these remax brokers don't have enough agents. So what are they doing? They're in production.

So they're making a little bit of desk rent. And now these agents that are a rematch are like, man, I could go over to EXP and pay less of what I'm paying in fees. And I need this office. I don't even go in here anyway. So, so in this like turmoil at remax. I mean, of course, you know, they came out with this super bold move, you know, at, you know, this year at their convention. They changed their logo again. you know i'm sure everybody was super excited and pumped about that like you know that's you know

it's the only that was the only thing they had going for him was that legacy balloon and you know like it or not you know it's recognizable and now it's not recognizable and now it's not recognizable they shrunk it and they put the big words remix there yeah um man it i i heard someone on stage in Cabo. By the way, what a great, great event. Wow. Cheers to Brent and James Group and Brent Gove. Another amazing event in Cabo. But someone was up on stage and I can't remember it was V or who it was, but I had an epiphany because it was like deja vu where they were like, man, when I was a remax, my broker would stand up and say, oh, let all those agents go over to Keller Williams. They'll learn

how to sell real estate. Then they'll come over and play with the big dogs. We all know what happened there. Keller Williams blew by remax like they were standing still. Keller, not only blew by them, but like double or triple their, you know, their growth, uh, remaxes growth. And guess what? Those agents never went back to remax when they got good. They just stayed at Keller. And then once, once, uh, Glenn launched XP, they've been slowly, all those top dogs have been slowly coming over and joining us. Right. So how'd that work out for you? How did that rhetoric work out? I was in those. It was. It was. It was. It was. It was. It was. It worked when they were, no one in the world sells more real estate than remax.

That worked. It was like you, you were lucky to graduate. They didn't even take most agents. Early on, it's like, man, we don't take new agents. Sorry. Now they're like, you got to, can you fog of mirror? We'll take you. So like, think about that.

Think about that. Like, what they represent, what they represent, what they represent, what they represent now, they don't really stand for anything. Hey, we got different splits here too. Yeah, we got, you know, you come over here on a 75, 25, we got this split, this split. Now they're basically in the same, you know, the same as anywhere or any of these other franchise models where there's no consistency, there's no standard, there's no, you know, it's just a dying brand.

Sad, but, you know, surprising, honestly, because they held that number one spot as, as the place to be as an agent. For a long time. They had a hell of a good run. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, you can always start to see when, you know, things are in trouble. I like to just, I'll just pay attention to how many, how much turnover and leadership is happening, right? And that just is like, okay, right? There's, there's really something happening

there. And, and I think that's really kind of interesting to pay attention to as you start to see big, big moves happening in, in companies and even what we're staying in, you know, in the cloud space, right? It's just really interesting. I don't know how much of a coincidence as you start to see, okay, well, that person left. Well, that person made a move. Oh, the reportings were not what they anticipated them to be. And so it's just always, as we know, layers deeper, but it's really like interesting to see things that are, things that are unraveling, even a close competitor of ours. I would love y'all's take as, you know, obviously the move with spring, then Sharon, obviously staying within, but getting out of the day to day.

What's happening? Yeah. So first of all, let me tell you an interesting stat. 9.2 agents every single day are coming back to EXP. I had 11 calls. I was on 11 calls yesterday. The two, three of them were three-way calls. Two of those three had been at EXP before and they're coming back. So, and, you know, I think that plays a lot to the. the current condition of the marketplace.

You've been in the business for years, and the last three years have been tough. The first year, man, I love my broker. I'm not going anywhere. The second year, like, man, this sucks. I got to do something different, not really ready to make a move. The third year of this down cycle, you're like, all right, there's got to be a better way. Right. And so the people are open now more open-minded than they've ever been, and they're looking to

where is the place that everybody's going. And it's, it's E-XP. And I want to make a point, too, because we went through, we rode the, we rode through, you know, trying to keep the wheels between the ditches between 20,000 and 80,000 agents. Extremely difficult to do that and be, and lead with cash flow. So we did this profitably, which says a tremendous amount about the model and the executive team and the execution. But if you, if you go and you look under the hood of our machine right now and you look at the statistics

and you look at what they're measuring on a daily basis from an operational efficiency, it is by far the most impressive thing about EXP. The fact that, you know, the whole time is less than 30 seconds. Like every, our net promoters score at EXP is 76, I believe it is. 77. Unheard of across great companies anywhere. Like that is unbelievable. And it's because they're measuring things that matter.

First tier support. You got a question at EXP. something like 70 something percent of the time it gets answered by the first person. They don't have to go ask somebody else. They can solve that problem right there, right there with you on the phone. And you don't have to wait. So the speed at which things are happening. And this is something that Leo told me, and one of the events he was speaking at that I was at recently,

and he's like, when agents come back to EXP, it's like they left and they're like, man, the grass is greener over here now. I'm going to go over here for a while. They go over there and they realize, man, they don't even pay me the same day. the things that we're doing that makes life easier for an agent is almost getting taken for granted. It's so easy, so fast, so good. And then you go over to an older slow dinosaur company. And it's like, man, I feel like I just walked into Blockbuster.

And I'm going to have to rewind my tape and bring it back. Like, this is not the same. And so they want to come back to where the efficiencies are and where things are easy. And now we've taken the spot as the number one training company in real estate. That used to be KW. KW had the best training. Right now, guys, you know this. What do we train on?

It wasn't EOS, but before that, we trained on EOS. Basically, the first version of EOS. We roll that out every six weeks. If you're a team and you want to get trained, we use that to pay for this level of coaching to learn how to strategically grow your business. That masterminds with the top agents in the world happening every day at EXP,

you want to get around the best people. That's how we've all got to become successful. That's happening every day at EXP. Oh, you're a new agent. What's your game plan? I have the new guy that joined that I told you all that was my Uber driver, right? So he takes me to the Mavs game, tells me I'm getting into real estate. Doesn't have any idea who I am.

I've got Ryan Finch in the car with me who used to sell thousands of homes. And it's like, this guy just hit the lottery as far as his Uber ride. You know what I'm saying? Like somebody that could help him. And he's like, I interviewed nine, eight brokerages. And I said, go to the brokerage that you talk to. I said, ask him what they're going to do from day one to day 90 to help you sell a house. And so he did.

And she fired him. got matched. You didn't have an answer. If you think it's more valuable over there, then you can just go over there. Well, that's because people don't do anything for you. So if you come over here and we show them what we're going to do for them, plus there's fast cap, the numbers coming out of fast cap are freaking mind-blowing. Like, I mean, it's early stages, but like you come over and you're a new agent, we got the best training in the world to get you into production. There's a plan for you. If you, they, you know, my joke that I say to everybody these days is like when you got your real estate license, they should just gave you a plaque that says figure it out because that's what it feels.

like, right? And so everybody in the industry is like, yep, that's what it feels like. But we're just getting better and better and better and better. And what's happening is we're just getting further ahead of the competitors in the space. And so we've got, you know, this interesting thing that's happened with Real. And I'll get to the point here. With Real, they're at 20,000 agents and they just hit the biggest headwin that we didn't hit until 80,000. We knew there was going to be competition. They're everyone that's out in the space that competes against XP. What's their story? What is their brand what do they stand for? We're going to be the next EXP.

The next EXP. We're going to be like, come over here. You'll be the next Brent Gove. You'll be the next Gene Frederick. The stock's going to go up. You saw what happened at DXP. Come over here. It's going to be the same.

And so they all took little pieces of our model. And interestingly enough, they copied our model, but they didn't copy our core values. So they're not ad job. They're certainly not profitable in most cases. Many of them are operating on so much less company. dollar to try to implement the people that you need to make agents happy. So when there's a problem at 20,000 agents, let me tell you at DXP how it looked. When there was a problem, we would scream to the rooftops, help, y'all, this is a problem. Help, help. And then about two, three weeks, maybe a

month later, they would get handled. And we'd be like, God dang, glad they fixed that because that was a real problem. And that was a long time for us to wait. Like, it wasn't happening. instantly because we were replacing these headwinds. And so, and that's just, actually at that point, no headwinds. That was just us trying to navigate, keep the wheels between the dishes. Can you hire fast enough? Can you put the right people in place? Can you cascade down leadership at a pace of which you can scale?

And we made it through all that only to have all this competition where the grass is greener come over here. And most of the people that left or the agents that didn't do nothing while they were here. And they said, this time I'm going to do it. I'm going to go over there this time and I'm going to take advantage of it. That's who left. And they went over there, whether they take advantage of it or not, I don't

no, but that's most likely not the case. And so many of these Me Too companies, I call it the Me Too movement, many of them are struggling. They're probably not going to survive. I know one of them, Epic I've heard is terrible at paying agents on time, which is the rule number one at broker is pay your agents on time. Rule number two, pay your agents on time. That's a big problem. The ability to do organizational excellence at scale is our competitive advantage now because now you can't get in the game and compete. with us and the opportunity is bigger here than it's ever been so now as we pulled spring away

do the math and you understand the opportunities really over here and then we roll out oh you know you know what real i got on a call with shrine love the guy by the way mad respect shron is a real o g think he's absolutely one of the best leaders in the real estate space i give him mad props and he pitched us he pitched me and you al if you remember and it was and it was and it was They sounded pretty good. And he said, you know, we had the blessing of coming second. Said nobody ever. There's no benefit to coming second because anything that you can do, we can do better.

So what do they do? They have co-sponsorship. They roll it out. What is it? It's division. You can co-sponsor. That's great. Hey, me and you can go get this agent.

We can bring them over to real. Okay, we're going to split the revenue share and 10% is going to go to the company for them managing that. We were all like, this is how dumb all of us were. we like this we want you to do it Glenn do it and Glenn's like let me think about it he comes back and says nah that's not a good idea let's do it this way we're going to make it multiplication so now if you co-sponsor with someone we're just going to create another spot underneath that you and that agent and when y'all can build a whole other seven levels underneath that game changed forever complete game changer so what a huge difference now anything you can do we can do better we just

took all all of your toys off the playground and you have no competitive advantage whatsoever. And if I'm the CEO and I'm facing headwinds of losing my number one recruiter and ESP's rolling out things that are better than what we're able to do and we don't have the money to fix problems that the agents are screaming about right now. They're facing headwinds when we didn't have to. I don't know why he stepped down, but I can understand why he maybe saw something that that was not, he didn't think he wanted to be a part of. I don't know. I don't know. They say, you know he's going to go to the board they spun it and the bunch you don't have the bet the dude that got everybody to join was charon and so i ain't doing those calls no more sure i'm going to be there

every day helping you guys they're going to see him 10 12 times a year if that he is not in that role and who do you replace him with who wants to follow that guy i mean that is leadership you don't if you didn't develop a leader from within which i would have thought charon would have been certain that there was somebody that could step in his shoes if he was stepping away. If it wasn't something for family health or something along those lines, and pray that it's not,

but if it's not something like that, to step away says a lot because no one can fill his shoes and he has to know that. And so they're left in a really interesting spot. You know, it'll be fascinating to see where they go from here. They are our number one competitor

and they're facing major headwinds that are going to be very difficult to fight alongside the same time, we just made the opportunity 10 times bigger at EXP for anybody that comes over. Let me give you an example. Caleb just joined us in Charleston. I'm at this event at Cabo.

Caleb schedules a three-way call at 6 o'clock in the morning. I get on the call. Somebody down there found out about co-sponsorship. Saw that Caleb joined. Caleb's a gangster. She's like, oh, my God, I've got two agents. I want to do a three-way call with you. Would you co-sponsor with me?

When Caleb joined, we didn't say, hey, guess what? agents that EXP are going to be calling you because you're a monster and everybody loves you and they're going to want to co-sponsor with you. That wasn't what we told him because we never had that opportunity before. Now as a major player that comes over, you have the ability to partner with anybody else in the company at the same time that's already here that was usually locked into where they're at and couldn't even partner with you. They would cheer you want to be like, yeah, dang, I wish I'd have got that guy. Now you can work with them. That is fundamentally a game

changer in a million different ways to think about it. And so huge, huge opportunity now that where I didn't see how we were going to really make up the ground and like really start growing again, I don't, there's no question. This thing is about to explode. Opportunities bigger has ever been. Yeah, Jay, I shared a reel with you that someone sent me. And I'm just going to say it is. it was a real that this guy was being interviewed and he had been he had dated one of shacks ex-girlfriends you all can fill in the blanks on this one okay

but he's like let me tell y'all you do not want to try and date one of shacks ex-girlfriends okay so just fill the blanks in that i mean that's that's the equivalent of what we're talking about and filling charon's shoes i mean you know he had us mesmerized i mean this man is the epitome of a leader he's smart he's smart he knows you know you know what his superpower is he he can connect with a human being like i've never seen anyone else connect it's magnetic it's it's but it's not scalable and and so that unicorn you know look look the one thing that i will also

tip my hat to to our competitor real and their leadership is they're the best it's spinning And so we've been saying all these, oh, I'm so excited. I'm so excited about the next chapter. Listen, with a publicly traded company being on the board, you know, even with our own company, most agents can't name two or three, four people that are on even our board, let alone Reels board. And one of the reasons is they work about 12 to 15 days a year. And that's about it.

Okay. And now I'm not saying that Sharon's only going to work 10 to 15. days per year he's he's he's he's a specimen built unlike many right but it is a big loss he's been on so many how many he's probably the only human being on earth that's been on more three-way calls than j kenders i don't think of anybody else yeah probably and and i got tired yeah i got tired it just doesn't make sense though al it doesn't make sense he did 65 keynotes in the fourth quarter of 24. You wouldn't do that. Unless something dramatically changed, you wouldn't step down, unless you knew there was a leader that could take your place. You're really abandoning

everything you've been selling for the last two years. Yeah. You're abandoning that. He's had quite a few exits, you know, where he's come in, built up, sold, gotten out. It's kind of been. Surely, surely, surely it's not his stock best. If that's it, man, that's weak, bro. I mean, you know, I don't think that, just, I don't know the man that well. I just know him from the conversation I've had and I've watched and I've seen him and I think he's a great leader. But it's almost like he didn't like the headwinds. You know, it's, that's what it looks like. Like, this is hard. Because the noise right now, I know what it's like. I already know what conversations are

like behind the scenes at real. I already know because you know what, they were like that with us. when we started facing competition, the screams and the sky is falling. We got to be a, we have to have a zero cost program or we're going to get beat by LPT. No, we're not. That's the race to the bottom. You got to have a box. We've got to have a box. We've got to have a box.

Like the noise from people that you would never think are going to be scared to death, we're scared and they were screaming it. And so like to be able to have to deal with that, maybe. when things are going well, he's good. Maybe adversity's not his thing. I don't know. I don't think that's his character. I really don't.

But anything outside of that doesn't make sense. If you stepped away, if your stock obviously vested and you stepped away during the hardest time, then he's not the person I thought he was. That would be the case. Well, Gene Frederick took, you know, when he came over, you know, there was a stock, you know, agreement made for him. If, you know, it was the whole company's growth, though, was. based upon it. And frankly, Glenn has even said, he's like, when I made that deal with Gene,

I didn't think we'd hit those numbers. We didn't just hit them. We blew those numbers away. And, but Gene was still, you know, he's still in the pocket. Gene doesn't have to work no more. Right. Gene can be living on his yacht over in Puerto Rico and not have to tend to anything for the rest of his life, but he's still in the pocket. And, you know, when you talk about, that's actually a really good point because I was thinking about it. And, and, you know, you can copy our model. You can try to copy our model. That's fine.

But you know what? You don't have a Gene Frederick. You don't have, you know, Rob Flick. I looked over at the pool and I was like, what is everybody over there gathering around? Like, everyone at the pool kind of just left everything. And it just kind of like sucked over here by this one area. I'm like, who is holding court? Rob Flick.

Yeah, I saw that too. It looked like church was in session. You know, there's no, you know, you're, you know, You're not going to duplicate a Brent Gove. They don't have that. It's an intangible. It's an intangible. Let me tell you what else they don't have.

And this is super important, by the way. They don't have a true visionary leader. They don't have Glenn Sanford. The visionary that created this company, they didn't have, all they did was see something working really well and say, we want to try to do it too. That's not a true visionary.

They just copied our model. That's not a true visionary leader. And I've watched from every decision that's been made. Now, we've gone through tremendous leadership changes. And every time we did, we leveled up our leadership. And guess what? Our competitors will take our, the person that it took us to get to hear was not the person it took to get to hear that Glenn understands that.

Our leadership team understands that. You've got to level up leaders to go from, you know, it's the ones and threes. John, you talk about it all the time. That is, we went through that cycle. That was a good person to have here for a period. And then we had to up level our leadership. that was interesting to watch. I was fascinated by how well and how quickly we replaced leaders that were not the right leaders.

And then watch our competitors take them and get all excited like they did something bigger. So that's an interesting thing. But you don't have Glenn. You weren't the visionary. Glenn, when he came up with this co-sponsorship, I was like, you got to be kidding. I would have never thought of it doing it that way in a million. You'd get me all the time in the world, I would have screwed it up. That is a visionary leader.

Now, other thing, and I will tell you, this is our, this is a. our super our super hero power right now is leo preha i will put that dude up against anybody i'll open the battle with that dude anytime and we just went through 18 months of the me too movement of all these competitors and he navigated that with brilliance and as an industry leader and and and led the we led the industry with leo and what he's been doing at the same time executing operational excellence at scale and adding more value to agents being the focus. Glenn's vision, run it through the filter. Does this add value to the agent?

Yes, do it, do it, do it, get better at it. And Leo's been executing that flawlessly across the board. There's nobody that I've seen. And I say Sharon was a great leader. Leo can run circles around him. I mean, I've watched the two of them. He's good. He ain't Leo.

And Leo did it during one of the hardest times in this company's existence. And I got to give that dude mad props, man. I am thoroughly grateful that he is at EFP. Yeah. The mindset too as well, everybody that, you know, underneath Glenn and Leo, from the brokers to, you know, the people in charge of all the education, I mean, Brian Ellington, he's phenomenal. Just to share just a really quick story with him just a few weeks ago,

I had one of my agents that they were going through fast cap and there was something they weren't happy about. I forget exactly what it was, but she mentioned, to me it's great but she wasn't happy about this i messaged that on workplace to brian brian took that information picked the phone called her talked to her about opinion and made some changes that was better because they were open for ideas and they're open to get better they always they're always are looking how to scale up and and make things better and they'll take um you know the the the ideas from this agent's been in apsep for like six months and but that's the

That's amazing. That's leadership. And it goes from the brokers to, you know, all the way up to the top. And it's because of Glenn and Leo and what they're doing. Yep. And I'm telling you, our competitors can't make that. Our competitors can't move at that pace. That is our advantage.

It's our competitive advantage right now. That we have great people, great leaders, enough people in every department to execute on a game plan. And they do not. And so when there is a problem like that, it falls on death fears. Nobody does anything until it becomes the biggest fire that's burning and it has to be a problem that gets solved. It gets put into the queue. It gets put on the list of things we'd like to do that we can't get to yet.

And that's the problem with being a competitor of ours is you have to sit and wait for that to get better knowing we're just getting stronger all the while. And that's why I showed it at one big fire. I showed my favorite photo, which is the secretariat photo when he wins the Triple Crown. and he's looking back, which they never do as a jockey, looking back at the competition they were so far behind, there was no way in the world. It was one of the greatest wins of all time in horse racing. But that is where we are right now.

And we literally are just getting started. This co-sponsor thing, it's like it's game theory. Once that move gets made, and not everybody in the company knows it, by the way. When I was it at Cabo, you know, they kind of, I think they kind of strategically slow release this. They let some leaders know. They put a little video out. big announcement, hey, this is going to start May 1. And, you know, we'll see kind of how,

how things flow out from here. But in the meantime, people are catching wind of this. And then, like, while I was there in the beginning, I was out, I think about 10% of the people here understand what this happened. And then bump into another person, another person, another person, they're like, this co-sponsorship. Tell me about it. What do you think? What is this? How's this going to work? And I'm like, okay, they're starting to get it. But when the entire company, 85,000 agents realized that the gates are unlocked and you can now bring in someone, to work with you. And, you know, it's, it's the biggest game. There's so many scenarios where that is helpful. And for the people that see, are here for the opportunity, which there are some people

here that just want to sell more real estate. And that's what we help them do. And there's some people are here for the opportunity. If you're looking for opportunity, you are absolutely going to be at XP. There is no question about it. So just a phenomenal opportunity. And again, it all revolves around, does this help agents, right? Does it help an agent if they can bring in someone, that could solve a problem for them or someone that has a real estate office they can go to or whatever the case may be, million scenarios you can think of. Absolutely, it helps the agent. So now, you know, I think it's going to restart the engine.

And, you know, it'll be fascinating to see what the growth looks like the next 12 to 18 months. But, you know, if you've been sitting around waiting thinking you missed the opportunity, you better get your ass over here because it's about to, it's about to be fun, fun, fun. Yeah. Yeah. What's really awesome to see is one with the co-sponsor, working with, you know, so many, so many agents that obviously have teams and focused on production that they've had to bring in somebody to help them operate that is not aligned to them. Now it's going to all work out. And it's always been kind of an issue, right?

But hey, hey, you know, I love them in here, but they're not in my downline. Like, you know, I don't want them to build. that's off the table now, right? So it's really cool to see that. It's so many problems. And this is why I love Leo. You know what Leo said? He said 92% of their support tickets, this solves the problem.

And I think go back to, you know, how we all go about making decisions and things that ultimately comes down to. And Leo is a guy that doesn't like noise. And what that means is that if 92% of the complaint, it's coming my way, I'm going to fix it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Period. Yep.

It's a good, good lesson. It's a really good lesson. Well, fellas, absolute fire. Always, always great to chop it in, get our, you know, y'all's perspectives, kind of where the industry is, where the company is, where things are going. And, yeah, definitely buckle up. It's going to be an interesting 12, 18, 24 months, that's for sure. But I know.

Those guys ahead. Go ahead. Hey, here's the price of eggs coming down, boys. Right on. You mentioned that, you know, EHP is where the pros go to grow and where people, if you want an opportunity, this is the place. And on the other side of that production,

if you're looking to grow, obviously this is the place as well. I want to hats off to you guys for building that lead generation system. You know, we've been sharing with our business partners, a $50,000 a month lead gen system. team that you guys have put together and basically just handing it down to your business partners. That's just a game changer.

It's already working. We already have agents that are selling houses that weren't selling houses that are, you know, adding what one to five deals a month to their bottom line. And that's not everyone in the company, but that's because, you know, with our group and what you guys are doing in a Honeybadger Nation, and when you think about some of these other competitors or some of these other companies, they don't even allow. allow your partners to do anything unless you scale it to the entire company, which obviously you just can't do.

Yeah. It's a crazy. It's nuts. I mean, it's nuts. And I told Glenn this in the very beginning because there was a little bit of noise about, you know, some of the things that we were doing to add value to agents. And I told Glenn, I said, Glenn, I said, if you're telling me I can't add value to agents that I bring to this company, then I'm at the wrong company.

And he's like, that's not what I'm saying. He said, you know, there's ways that you can do it. How many ways are there? You know, he hit me with like the ultimate answer and made my head spin. And I was like, you're right. I could probably do it differently. And so just to play well with others because the goal was never to not play well with others, but the model that we have doesn't allow us to play well with others.

So now, everybody, nobody, you, oh, man, I came under this guy and I didn't know any better and I wish I could leave. You had to leave for six months and come back. Not anymore. You can go partner with that person now. you can bring that person in and it doesn't affect their upline or you can come in as a co-sponsor under them. There's so many ways to play the game now that we can add more value. But you don't want to take out of the hands the people that can add value, their value stack of what they're going to do to help agents because that's what makes.

That's the catalyst for how we recruit. We bring more agents because we figure out how to add more value, how to solve problems for agents, on top of what the company's doing. we're out there doing it too. And you want everyone in the company trying to think, how can I make life easier for agents? That is a huge part of our value prop. It's not just the company to do it. We're all thinking this way.

Everybody wins only if they win, we win. If we can't help them win, if we can't help agents win, we don't win. So we have to think, how do we help them win? We wake up everyday thinking, how do I help more agents win? How can we implement more ways to help agents win? And when you got a whole company of people thinking that way, and we all benefit if we're able to help agents, what happens is significant growth.

That's what happens. Yeah. Andre, appreciate you. Fellas. Love you guys. Love you. See you next time. See you too.

That's a wrap for today. I hope you got something valuable from this episode. If you did, hit follow and visit johncitchens. com coach for more ways we can work together. See you on the next episode.