HousingWireHousingWire
While the commission lawsuits and the business practice changes outlined in the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) settlement occupied notable portions of 2024 for The Real Brokerage, impressive organic growth is the firm’s true highlight of the year.
Real ended 2023 with 13,650 agents and as of Wednesday the company reports that it has now reached 23,000 agents.
“We are seeing bigger and bigger opportunities to grow organically through larger and larger teams and independent brokerages that are considering joining us or engaging in conversations with us,” Tamir Poleg, the CEO and chairman of Real, said. “A year or two ago, a large opportunity for us would be someone coming with 100 agents or maybe 150 agents. Now we are talking to organizations that have 400, 500 or 600 agents, so it seems like we are evolving in terms of what kinds of prospects we are attracting.”
While Poleg is not ruling out the possibility for some merger and acquisition action in the new year if the right opportunity came along, this impressive organic growth is something Poleg hopes his firm carries into the new year.
“I think 2025 is going to be another major growth year for us,” Poleg said.
In order to continue to accelerate agent count growth, Poleg said Real is focusing on providing value for its agents.
“Going into 2025, we are remembering the fact that this company was built in order to constantly provide value for agents,” Poleg said. “That is what we have been doing for the past 10 years and that is what we will continue to focus on and it is what is driving our growth. At the end of the day, if you build value for people, people will follow.”
In 2024, much of this value came in the form of agent education and guidance as the real estate industry looked to navigate a turbulent year full of change, but in 2025 Poleg said more of that focus will be on technology tools, and streamlining the home-buying process by further developing the ancillary services Real offers.
“The consumer experience in buying a home is not a great process right now — it’s broken, it lacks transparency, speed and control and we think that it can be improved using technology while leaving the agents at the center of the transaction,” Poleg said.
With this in mind, Poleg said Real is shifting more of its resources to work on consumer facing products and initiatives, which he believes will help Real agents gain a competitive advantage. Part of this, of course, is artificial intelligence.
“We are betting big on AI and AI’s ability not to replace our agents, but to replace them having to do some of the tedious tasks that they need to complete every day,” Poleg said. “With AI, our agents will really be able to be available to consumer 24/7, but they will also be able to provide consumers with a better level of customer services.”
According to Poleg, this will mean increased focus on some of the products Real announced in October, including Leo CoPilot and Leo for Clients, which is scheduled to launch in Q2 of 2025.
Although Real is not alone in launching AI products and assistants for its agents, Poleg believes Leo CoPilot has several advantages compared to any potential competitors.
“I think what we are doing different goes back to many years ago, way before people were even thinking about AI — it is how we chose to build our own platform and own our own technology. Now we have ended up with a platform where we own all of the software and that provides us and the AI we have built on top to it, with visibility into everything that our agents do. With the AI layer, we are able to draw insights and information from the platform and deliver better value to our agents and their clients.”
Although AI will certainly be taking up a lot of resources at Real in 2025, Poleg does not want to neglect the firm’s ancillary services. Real owns mortgage and title companies, and in 2025, Poleg said he hopes to drive increased attach rates.
“People have been talking about streamlining the transaction process by integrating title, mortgage and brokerage services for a while. We have been asking ourselves how can we do this and this is why we chose to own all of the main building blocks of a transaction,” Poleg said.
But what Real is in the process of figuring out, according to Poleg, is the glue that binds all facets of the transaction together. Initially, Poleg said the company believed it would be a consumer-facing app, but after realizing that consumers only use a small portion of the apps they download, the firm changed tactics.
“Eighty percent to 90% of the conversations between our agents and their clients are done via text. What we are working on is combining our AI capabilities with us owning mortgage and title and just packaging everything in a textual interface for our agents and clients, so that you don’t have to download an app,” Poleg said. “Creating an end-to-end solution for a homebuyer is the Holy Grail and I believe that we are on our way.”
With this North Star guiding the way, Poleg and Real are heading into 2025 ready to home in on fine-tuning and utilizing technology to allow their agents to better serve consumers.
