Congratulations! You’ve decided that Exp Realty will be the broker of choice that you join. However, I want to tell you about one of the biggest mistakes that agents make when joining eXp Realty. Not a lot of agents talk about this, so you might not be aware of it until it’s too late… Continue reading so that you don’t make the same mistake.
In this blog article, I’m going to explain one of the most critical decisions that could affect your success at Exp Realty. So what is it? Just say it already! When you fill out your application to join Exp Realty, you’ll be asked to name your sponsor. Choose your sponsor carefully. Why? Well once, you’ve named your sponsor, you cannot change it. To further understand the importance of this, you need to understand what a sponsor is and how they can provide value to you.
At the most basic level, a sponsor’s role at Exp Realty is to bring another agent over to Exp Realty. This means they introduce Exp Realty to an agent and are the procuring cause as to why the agent decided to join Exp Realty. So naturally when that agent decides to join Exp Realty, they write that agent down as their sponsor without much further thought about what effects this could have for them and their real estate business.
Understand that per Exp Realty rules the sponsor has no other required obligations once the agent has joined Exp Realty. The sponsor isn’t required to help the agent further IF they don’t want to. Why? Because there are other training resources at Exp Realty, the managing broker, and Exp Realty mentors. So it isn’t necessary for the sponsor to do much else. What does the sponsor get from bringing on agents to Exp Realty? Well, the sponsor get’s a small commission award every time that agent sells a home until that agent has capped. And in turn, the agent could get nothing from the sponsoring agent. So this is not a very good trade for the agent. And this is actually a very common complaint that some agents who end up leaving Exp Realty say. My sponsor ghosted me as soon as I joined Exp Realty. I never saw them again, they never responded to me at all. And so I just left Exp Realty. And I am here to say that while this is unfortunate, this does happen. There are many sponsoring agents who don’t do much to help the agents that they bring aboard Exp Realty and that is a shame.
Don’t be discouraged, there’s a right way to join Exp Realty. And that is to do your research and choose your sponsor carefully. So at Exp Realty, their business model allows agents to build a brokerage within a brokerage. This is similar to forming a team, however, note that there is what is known as a self-organized team. This means that agents are still fully independent but still a part of a self-organized team, there aren’t any formal team agreements, and no commission splits to the team leader. And at Exp Realty, there are a lot of these self-organized teams which are built through sponsoring agents under each other. Many of these teams consist of top-producing agents who sponsor other agents to their team. The value that these sponsors bring is their knowledge, expertise, exclusive access to their team’s community, training, mentoring, proprietary tools/software, and ultimately help with growing an agent’s business! Some of these mega teams become so successful that they have leaders on every single level, those leaders end up building another rockstar team under the main team, and so on. On top of this, by joining an eXp Realty agent that is under a certain team’s family tree, you now have access to leverage the resources of not only the team that you’re directly under but also the rest of the mega teams under your Exp Realty family tree! This is absolutely amazing!
So you might be thinking, why would the parent team allow access to their community from all of their “child” teams? It’s because of Exp Realty and the revenue share program, going 7 layers deep. When the top-level sponsor #7 on your Exp Realty family tree, is able to help you grow and continue to succeed, they too will be rewarded with a small commission award from your sale and so does everyone else above you on your Exp Realty family tree. So it is a group effort! It takes a village to raise a successful rockstar agent! And this is the way that the revenue share and sponsoring agents is meant to work! It is meant to be able to allow agents to build highly successful brokerages under the Exp Realty brokerage banner. This allows the agents to focus on the real estate side, and leave all the managing broker duties, liabilities, and responsibilities to Exp Realty.
With all of that said your success at Exp Realty could be affected greatly by who you choose to join as your sponsor. If you choose any regular Exp Realty agent, they may not have any value to offer you. Instead, do your research on who are the best sponsor teams at Exp Realty. Find the ones that you resonate with the best, and interview them! Find out what their culture is like in their group. What is their value add proposition for you? Make sure that there is alignment of interest.
As I mentioned in the beginning, once you name your sponsor at Exp Realty. The only way to change it is if you leave Exp Realty for 6 months. Then you can rejoin under a new sponsor. And I’ve seen a few Exp Realty agents do this. They realize they made a mistake the first time, or things didn’t quite pan out to what they thought they would, so they came across a better team for them and they want to switch. And now you know, so you can hopefully avoid the same critical mistake. If you have any questions about this, leave them in the comments section below.