eXp Realty’s Leo Pareja looks forward to incremental change in 2025

Although eXp Realty’s tagline may be “the most agent-centric brokerage on the planet,” CEO Leo Pareja said the company will strive to keep the best interests of the consumer at the center of its decisions in 2025.

According to Pareja, this is a way of thinking he really homed in on in 2024.

“The one thing that has kind of been driving my decision making this year is keeping the consumer at the center of that decision-making tree,” Pareja said. “Like, let’s pause for a second and think through what is best for the consumer. How do we best protect them when they are making a super expensive decision that is extremely stressful, infrequent and emotionally taxing?  

“It is easy for us, n these moments to get lost in the ‘inside baseball’ jargon of the industry, but if you remember the consumer, I feel like it crystalizes for us what to do in those moments — like the ones we had in 2024 when we didn’t really have a road map.”

For Pareja, a prime example of this in the past year was when he and other eXp leaders decided to create their own forms. This included a buyer representation agreement that was mandated under the terms of the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) now approved commission lawsuit settlement agreement.

When crafting the buyer representation agreement, Pareja said he put himself in a position of an agent sitting in the driveway of a property with a new client. He then tried to figure out how to create an agreement that a buyer would feel comfortable signing.

“You are in the driveway with this buyer that you don’t really know and you know you have to have this agreement to be compliant, but you don’t want this to be a confrontational moment with the consumer,” Pareja said. “What is the best thing for consumer experience or choice? That is really what we focused on.“

While he is not expecting eXp or the real estate industry at large to confront such massive shifts in 2025, Pareja also does not believe that many of the themes the industry faced in the past year will suddenly disappear with the changing of the calendar.

“I think 2025 will be more about implementing and finding best practices again,” Pareja said. “The beauty of capitalism is that service providers will provide a service and consumers will vote yes or no with their dollars. I think as we move forward and everyone gets used to the new things, best practices will emerge.”

In addition to the solidification of best practices in 2025, Pareja also believes the industry may see some of the business practice changes outlined in NAR’s settlement codified into law.

“I fully expect to see some of this become laws in certain states — particularly the requirement for buyer agency agreements, which were already required by law in some states. And then that state law will dictate some of the best practices, which is good because I feel like there is still quite a bit of confusion out there and a variety of interpretations,” Pareja said.

There has been ambiguity and a lack of information regarding many of the recent industry changes, which Pareja attributes much of the confusion to. He said this has resulted in an interesting test in leadership.

“It has been an interesting process of trying to see what is meant by things and having this imperfect information, but at the end of the day, having to make a decision and explain why we made it,” he said. “Letting go of how we used to do things can be hard, but it is necessary sometimes. And just because we used to do it a certain way doesn’t mean we always will.

“And standing up for what you feel is right matters — even if you are the only one doing it — and through this I’ve learned that grace and empathy are superpowers.”

While Pareja’s thinking may have shifted to focus on the consumer, he said that doesn’t mean he is discounting the needs and wants of his agents.

“By choosing to do what is best for the consumer, that is how you win as a company,” Pareja said. “And I’m not saying what’s best for the agents but what is best for the consumer. Because if we focus on that, with the rules of capitalism, we will win disproportionately for our agents because we are doing what is right for the ultimate end users.”

Pareja is hoping 2025 will be a year full of “incremental new information” rather than another year of “exponential new information,” as he feels 2024 was. But either way, he is confident that eXp is ready to handle whatever is thrown their way in the new year.

“You can choose to be a market participant or not. And in choosing to participate, we have to operate with the rules that are given to us. And if things change, we will adjust,” Pareja said.