LPT Realty CEO on ‘agent choice,’ scaling to 100K 

Once considered a novelty, the cloud-based, revenue-sharing brokerage model popularized by eXp has proven its staying power. eXp competes at the level of stalwarts like Anywhere and HomeServices, and Real Brokerage, just 10 years old, has demonstrated consistent — and stratospheric — growth.

Now, an even younger firm, Florida-based LPT Realty, is aiming to take on major competitors like eXp. LPT not only offers a similar downline model, it has also recruited top talent away from the brokerage giant. 

LPT Realty Founder and CEO Robert Palmer — whose background is in the mortgage business — says he's big on "agent choice." He believes that offering different fee structures and allowing agents to opt-in to revenue share programs will be key to LPT's success. And the industry is taking notice: This year, Palmer moved up 103 spots to No. 68 on this year's Swanepoel Power 200 rankings.

Palmer spoke with Real Estate News about what sets LPT apart, his approach to growth, and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Big Block Realty and its 1,200 agents moved over to LPT recently. How did that deal come together, and what's your current agent count?

Big Block wasn't an acquisition — they just joined. We haven't done any acquisitions at this point and don't have plans to do any. I think of it more as a walkover. If you look at the traditional brokerages or flat-fee brokerages, they do acquisitions to grow. They go in and they buy competitors and they roll them up. You've seen that with HomeSmart, Fathom and United Real Estate. Because of our hybrid model, we've been able to have all this meteoric growth organically with walkovers and no actual acquisitions.

We're right around 15,000 agents where we sit now. We officially announced 10,000 agents at the end of March, but we haven't announced an agent count since then. While we are fast growing — and that is an important part of the business — we don't want it to be the focus, because we want our agents to really feel proud of the real estate they sell, not just the recruiting efforts.

There are other cloud-based brokerages with revenue share models. What sets LPT apart — both in terms of agent attraction and in becoming a sustainable business?

I think of it less as the "cloud" model and more of the single-entity national model — the idea that we're not a conglomerate of individually owned franchises. There's a lot that we can do to push the envelope that the other competitors aren't doing, like having two comp plans. I understand why it wouldn't work in a 200-person franchise brokerage office, because there's just not enough scale there to offer that type of choice. 

But when you're talking about building a platform that can scale to 100,000 or 150,000 agents under a single entity, you have to have choices. You need to have opportunities for agents to thrive at different points in their lifecycle. I think that's really what we pioneered.

Some say the downline model gives rise to unproductive agents or a 'professional recruiter' mindset, and can lead to siloing. What are your thoughts?

I'm big on the idea of individuals having their own definition of success. A massive chunk of our industry is part time, and we don't want to ignore that. The other thing I think that's really important is that today's part-timer is tomorrow's top producer. You know, we all started somewhere.

If you do want to become that top producer, or move to full time, or become a team leader yourself, you can do all of that without having to change your brokerage flag, without having to change your business card, your tools, your culture, your community — and I think that's really important. Most agents find themselves on a path as a two- to three-unit producer before they become a 20- or 30-unit producer, and before they become a 1,000-unit mega-team producer. We want the LPT platform to serve at all those different levels.

As for siloing, we really do exist as a single community. We don't allow downline-exclusive masterminds or groups — if you're going to do something, it needs to be available to all LPT agents, because we don't want to create silos. I don't think that's healthy for the business. 

Brokerages aren't just competing for agents and teams — they're competing for executive talent. Last year, you hired two former eXp leaders, Michael Valdez and Jeff Whiteside. Is recruiting execs from competitors part of LPT's strategy?

There's only a handful of real competitors playing in this single-entity, national space, where people are used to dealing with tens of thousands of agents under a single flag — so that definitely limits where we can go looking for talent. 

Michael and I met at the Homes.com event at the Super Bowl last year, and just hit it off. There was no active thought of, 'Hey, I'm gonna go recruit Michael away from eXp' — we met each other and he understood the vision and the power of what we're building at LPT and got really excited about it. 

And Jeff Whiteside is interesting because he's the only person who's been the CFO of a cloud brokerage with more than 25,000 agents. As we're on this journey to get the company IPO-ready and make sure we're there for the Wall Street reporting and everything else, he really was the only guy with the qualifications and the resume to be able to lead that.

Another executive we're going to be announcing in the next week, Mercedes Saewitz, recently joined us from Compass. She was their state broker from Florida, and their head of all state brokers nationally. She just moved over.