Welcome back to Evercore ISI's 8th Annual Payments and Fintech Innovators Forum. I'm David Togut. I lead the payments and fintech team here at Evercore ISI. Delighted to kick off our next fireside chat with the management of Real Brokerage. Joining us in the fireside are Tamir Poleg, Chairman and CEO. Tamir, thank you so much for being with here today. Thanks for having me. Also in the audience we have Michelle Ressler, CFO, and Ravi Jani, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you so much for being with us today. For those who are new to the Real story, could you provide a quick overview of the company and key growth drivers? So Real is a real estate tech company. We created a platform that improves the home buying and selling experience for real estate agents and their clients. I guess that the reason why we're here is because we're currently regarded as a real estate brokerage. This is where the majority of our revenue is coming from. But we are venturing into new products such as mortgage, title, fintech-oriented products. So our revenue will be generating. We'll start generating from different streams. On the brokerage side, we are by far the fastest growing player in the industry. Last year we grew revenue by around 90%, whereas the real estate sales were down 20%. So we're doing something good. We're attracting a lot of agents to our platform. We started back in 2014. We went public in 2020 when we had about 1,000 agents. Currently we have over 15,000 agents. That places us as a top 10 brokerage in the country. We operate in all 50 states in the U.S. and in four provinces in Canada. We are a pure tech player. We develop our own proprietary technology that allows our agents to be more efficient, market themselves better, allows us to run a brokerage in a more efficient way. As I said at the beginning, we are now starting to integrate mortgage title brokerage into one end-to-end consumer-facing app. A lot of exciting things happening. Great. Thank you for that. And what's your current assessment of the real estate market and your outlook for 2024 in terms of demand? I think that one of the benefits of us having such a huge number of agents on our platform and us interacting with tens of and potentially hundreds of thousands of consumers on a daily basis gives us a lot of visibility. So I think that going into 2024, first half of January, there was a lot of optimism. We saw mortgage rates dipping a little bit. And we saw a lot of demand. So I think that between the beginning of the year and the third week of January, a lot of demand, more supply as well. And the market has been very supply-constrained for a couple of years now. And then mortgage rates started increasing again. And demand dropped a little bit. So I think that right now we're seeing a very sensitive market when it comes to mortgage rates. So buyers are super sensitive. But I think that if we're looking at the entire 2024, I think that we will see an improvement in the transaction count overall in the market. We think that we will see 8%-10% more transactions in 2024 compared to 2023. And that number will probably improve in 2025. If you look at the historical average of number of homes sold in the U.S. per year, the average is around 5.1 million, 5.2 million. Last year it was around 4.1 million. So we are still very far from that average. I think that this year we will see 4.4 million homes sold. So that's our estimate. But again, it's very rate-sensitive at the moment. Appreciate that. You mentioned that you recently reached over 15,000 agents. That's up significantly from the third quarter level of 12,000 agents. How has Real been so successful in growing its agent counts that rapidly and you think you can sustain this high level of growth? I think we can actually exceed that high level of growth. So in the first week of January, we added 500 agents in a single week. The entire month of January, we added more than 1,000 agents to the platform. So we are seeing the number of agents that are joining picking up. The reason why agents are attracted to our model is, let's first of all, frame the conversation. There are 1.5 million agents in the U.S. plus 160,000 in Canada. Agents have to be affiliated with a brokerage. Historically they have been affiliated with traditional brokerages, folks like RE/MAX, Century 21, Keller Williams. When we came in, we looked at agents as independent contractors. We wanted to create a platform for them to grow their businesses on. So we wanted to deliver a better service at a lower cost. I think that this is why agents are joining us. Agents join us because they want the freedom and flexibility to build their businesses the way they want to instead of sitting in an office and being told what to do by a broker. Second is the favorable economics. The average agent will end up paying half at Real versus what they're currently paying at their traditional brokerages. The third is the technology that we offer them that allows them to save time and eventually make more money. Translate that save time into more transactions. The last thing I would say is the opportunity. Agents own equity in the company. This is why we went public. We wanted to create an equity incentive program for the agents. Agents own a piece of the company. They can generate revenue through multiple streams, not only closing deals. So if they, for example, attract their friends, we pay them a portion of that revenue that's generated by their friends. So it's kind of an affiliate program. It's just a massive opportunity for agents compared to what's currently offered to them right now in the market. And I think that in the past nobody knew about us. So maybe the growth was a little bit slower. And right now we are becoming kind of the talk of the town. And everybody's talking about Real. And this is why we're seeing more and more agents joining us and more productive agents. What we also see is kind of a clear trend of the per-agent productivity on our platform increasing. So at the beginning we were attracting the low-producing agents and then the average-producing agents. Now we're starting to attract the higher-producing agents and teams. I think that that trend will continue. I think that when I look at the landscape, I think that there are very few players that can offer the amount of value that we can at the cost that agents have to pay. Well, on that topic, who do you see as your primary pure-play competitors who might have somewhat similar technology capability? So our closest comparable is probably EXPI just because they are like Real. They have no offices for the agents to use. They're non-brick-and-mortar. They have a revenue share program for the agents. So like us, they do not spend money on upfront marketing. They rely on their agents to attract their friends to the company. And I think that those are the two biggest similarities. But as I said at the beginning, I think that those two companies are very different just because of our consumer-facing vision The fact that we are now building a consumer-facing app and consumer-facing tools, and the fact that we're trying to integrate mortgage and title, the fact that we are launching a digital wallet, which nobody else has. So I think that right now this is our closest comparable. But in about a year we'll probably create our own category of financial ecosystem company in the real estate space. And then probably others will follow. Can you talk about the technology platform you built and what makes it unique? And related to that, how are you implementing GenAI in your business? Sure. So we look at tech as 4 main segments, the first being productivity, everything that can help agents save time and make money from the very simple task as searching listings in real time and having a powerful CRM and a 24/7 support and a transaction management system that allows agents to draft contracts and then for review and e-signature, a dashboard that shows them where they stand. All of that falls under the bucket of productivity. By the way, we are a mobile-focused company. Everything we develop is for our agents' mobile app because we believe that agents should be out nurturing relationships with clients and working on transactions. By the way, the overwhelming majority of our technology is proprietary. The only thing that is not is a CRM. The second bucket of technology is marketing. Probably the people in the crowd have never heard about Real because we decided not to be a consumer-facing brand. Nobody chooses an agent today based on their brand affiliation. Nobody goes into a RE/MAX office saying, hey, I'm looking for an agent. I know that RE/MAX has great agents. People choose agents because they know that that person is an expert. Maybe they worked with that person in the past. Maybe that agent helped a friend. We decided that we are going to focus our marketing efforts on helping our agents brand themselves within their communities. The offline aspect of it is that if an agent needs business cards, listing presentations, yard signs, brochures, swag, car magnets, whatever it is, they can order it on our platform. It gets delivered to their home. And there's an online aspect to it as well because let's face it, about 100% of home buyers are starting their home search online. So you have to be there. So every agent at Real receives a personal-branded website, a personal-branded app. They can invite their clients to visit the website, download the app, look at listings, look at the agent's bio. Everything, by the way, is free as part of the Real package. So they don't have to pay extra for it. So that's the second bucket. The third bucket is community. As a company, we do not have offices for the agents to use. This is a huge cost saving for us. But we understand that agents do want to interact, feel a part of a big group. So we have a community feature on the app where agents can chat one-on-one or in groups, ask questions, celebrate success, exchange leads. And it's pretty amazing to see all of the interactions on a daily basis on the app. The fourth segment of the technology, which is probably our biggest competitive advantage, is brokerage operations. Think about the back office of a brokerage, those people that are handling support tickets and transaction management, reviewing files, payment processing, all of those things. We automated them. So at a brokerage, traditional brokerage, you would have one employee for every 20 agents. Our ratio is 1 to 100. Typically you would spend at the brokerage a couple of hours to process a transaction, review the file, see what's missing, call the different parties, coordinate. In our case it's 2 minutes. So just earlier today we looked at, for example, Compass financials. We saw that they have 400 people on their transaction team processing about twice the number of transactions as we do. We have 9 people. So that's a huge competitive advantage. And I think that that allows us to scale and grow and enter new markets and just onboard a lot of agents, for example, 500 agents in a single week without adding operating expenses. Now when it comes to AI, a few months ago we introduced Leo. Leo is an AI-based personal assistant for our agents. Because we have all of that technology, because we have all of that knowledge in-house, that enables us to create a layer of AI in order to provide our agents faster responses. So Leo currently handles about 800 daily tickets, which is pretty amazing. Think about the amount of people you would need in order to cater to 800 tickets a day. That saves us a few people on the support team. But Leo has now become proactive. Leo 2.0 is now able to proactively go to agents and say, hey, David, you have a transaction closing in 2 days. But I'm looking at the files. And you're missing a signature on this addendum. And you're missing a phone number on this document. Please send them so we can pay you on time. Leo is becoming proactive. And Leo will be also used in our consumer-facing app. For example, if you're a home buyer and you're applying for a loan on our app, Leo will be able to guide you through all of the different processes, what's missing, what kind of documents you have to provide. If you have a question of why do I need to provide you this, Leo will help you with that. AI is becoming a huge and integral part of our business in two ways, one, improving the experience for our agents and their clients. And two, just a huge cost saving for us. That's great. Thank you for that. You mentioned Real Wallet earlier, which is effectively a card program for your agents. Can you talk about the strategy behind Real Wallet and why you're so excited about it going forward? Yeah. Real Wallet is probably the one product I'm most excited about in the short term. A brokerage, at the end of the day, is a transaction processing machine. We process real estate transactions. Now for most brokerages, the way they make money is splitting commissions with their agents. So let's say in our case we split on an 85/15 basis. So an agent closes a deal. We receive the commission check. We deposit it. And then we pay the agents 85% of it. That means that the majority of the revenue that a brokerage generates on the top line is not monetized because it's a pass-through. We deposit and then immediately pay the agents. So we thought, how can we actually generate some revenue out of that? And then the idea of the wallet came into life. The wallet essentially is a digital wallet that every agent will have. When they close a deal, the money will be deposited into their Real Wallet. And then they can either withdraw it into their own bank account or they will have a debit card that they can use in order to spend that money. And if they swipe the debit card, obviously we make the interchange fees. And they earn points that will help them offset some brokerage fees. But there is much more to it. Because of the fact that we own all of our technology and we have so much data on our agents, we know exactly how many clients they're dealing with right now, what their past production has looked like, how is it trending, how many transactions they have under contract, how much equity they own in the company, how many agents they refer to Real and they earn revenue share on, we have a lot of data points. And that enables us to underwrite them to a dedicated dynamic credit line for each and every agent. And that's a game changer because all of a sudden agents can have access to credit in order to grow their businesses if they want to invest in marketing, buy more leads, I don't know, do whatever they want. And for us, we can make money out of collecting the APR and interchange fees. Now the beauty of this program is that from a company perspective it's a non-risk program. Typically when you lend or when you offer credit there is a risk associated. And obviously we underwrite it in a way that we will be kind of minimizing the risk. But because we have a revenue share program, which is essentially us paying the agents for referring their friends, it's a huge portion of our gross profit that's being paid back to the agents. Any default under the credit card program will be taken out of the revenue share stream. So it's a non-risk for the company with very high profitability. And that's launching in about a month and a half. Great. So super exciting. And by the way, that kind of opens the door to a lot of different fintech-oriented products that we can offer our agents and their clients because at the end of the day when you're buying a home you're spending a lot of money. And sometimes you need access to credit. Sometimes you need short-term loans. Sometimes you need a bridge loan for your mortgage. All of those things we can offer and leverage the trust that our agents have with their clients in order to sell additional services. Thank you for that. I'll just pause for a minute to see if there are any questions in the audience. We have a mic. Please raise your hand if you have a question. Besides the credit line, what else is an incentive for your brokers to keep their money in your wallet? It's a great question. Two things. One, every time they swipe either the debit card or the credit card they earn points. Those points will help them offset brokerage fees. So at the end of the day they could be a part of a brokerage where they're not paying any fees because they're using those other services. So that's one. Second, we are now looking into ways that will incentivize the agents to keep money in their wallets so we can leverage that money and lend it to others in a way that will be financially beneficial to them. So obviously you're getting into lending laws and all of that. But there are some ways for us to actually offer financial incentives to agents for keeping money and locking them in their wallets for a certain number of weeks or months. It doesn't sound like you guys have any competitors. Do you have any competitors that are doing it like you were? Do you see any other brokerage firms that are fast following you? I think that if we look at Real as only a brokerage then yes, we compete with everyone else. We compete with traditional brokerages. We compete with companies like EXPI that have kind of more similar models. If we look at Real as a financial ecosystem around the real estate home buying or selling, then we're probably pioneering this space. And as I said, once we are able to integrate mortgage and title and brokerage into the app, once we have the wallet in place, in that category we're just currently alone. And by the way, not a lot of companies would be able to do the wallet just because of the technology that you need to have in the background. The overwhelming majority of companies just do not have that technology. Thank you. So do you help out the agents to market their properties on your platform? Like I would say, there are other non-digital agent companies or franchises who allow to kind of put up the listings on their website as such. So my question is basically how do you help out besides forming a community in helping them market those properties? Obviously we are members of hundreds of MLSs. When agents have listings, we push that data into the MLSs. That's visible to the entire public through Zillow, through other portals. Early on we thought that one of the main strategies for us should be helping our agents with marketing. We built, for example, a system that knows how to buy leads from Zillow and then target or funnel that lead to the perfect agent to cater to that specific person based on different criteria. What we have seen is that the ROI for us was not there. Leads have become very much a commodity. We decided not to go into what you would call marketing. What we also see is that unlike other firms, agents at Real are more reliant on social media and content in order to generate leads versus buying them. So we help them through education. We help them through our Real Academy, which is kind of an academy for agents to learn different things. We help them through local events with very successful agents that teach them different strategies. But from a product perspective this is not something that we want to focus on. Can you just talk about the revenue model a little more in terms of you mentioned revenue share for your competitors? And then just kind of how you think the regulatory stuff evolves in terms of commission rates and things of that nature? Yeah. Thank you. So our business model currently relies heavily on splitting commissions with our agents. When an agent joins, they pay a $249 joining fee. They have an annual brokerage fee of $750 that we charge. And then we have an 85/15 split with our agents on every deal up to a cap. Once they pay us $12,000 a year in commission splits, they get to keep 100% of their commissions. And they only pay a transaction fee of $315. So this is extremely favorable or attractive to high performing agents and teams. On top of that there is a $30 transaction fee on all transactions. But this is how we make money. Obviously on title we make money through title revenue. And the gross margins there are over 80%. On mortgage we have margins of around 50%. So super high margin businesses. In terms of how the future looks like, I would say that historically if you look at the trend over the past 25 years, the average commission total commission on a deal went from 6% to a national average of 5.1%. It's slowly declining. I believe that it will continue to decline. Maybe now with everything that's happening with the DOJ and the antitrust lawsuits, maybe that will accelerate. There will be a point of equilibrium at some point. I think that it's very likely that buyer commission and seller commission will be decoupled. Every party will pay their own side, their own agent. Maybe that will put a lot of pressure on buyers' commissions. I think that if we're trying to guess what will happen in 10 years and by the way, this is not happening overnight. This is a process that will probably take years. If I have to predict or guess what's going to happen in 10 years I would say that we will see fewer buyer agents. The commissions that are paid by buyers will probably be lower than the 2.6% that we're currently seeing. This is part of the reasons why we as a company are thinking about commissions or transactions as a whole as a funnel. The agents are a way to drive transactions to the top of the funnel right now. We're monetizing through real estate commissions. We're starting to monetize through brokerage, through mortgage, through title, through home insurance later on in the year through Wallet. I think that the future of brokerage is very much in finding ways to monetize transactions in different ways and monetize agents' businesses in different ways. Because if you're solely relying on commissions you're probably at risk. You mentioned a little bit earlier that the debit card associated with the Real Wallet. Who is the issuing bank for the debit card? We work with a company called Unit which is our BaaS partner. They work with different banks. So, is your revenue stream? Do you get interchange revenue? Yes. That's your primary revenue stream on the debit card? For the exactly. Essentially is it issued by sort of a Durbin exempt bank? So are you under the regulated debit interchange cap? Yes. OK. Correct. Got it. In terms of the market environment it's obviously been very difficult market environment for housing over the last couple of years. What's your outlook for the real estate market for 2024 and beyond? Yeah. So the real estate market has been challenging. So in 2023 transactions were down almost 20% year-over-year, almost 40% if you look at 2023 versus 2021. As I said in 2023 we grew revenue. And we haven't announced Q4 yet. But let's say looking at Q3 we grew revenue by around 90%. So obviously while the industry was facing the most difficult year in more than two decades we managed to grow significantly which kind of is a testament to the resilience of our model and the fact that we're doing a good job on execution. I think that we are seeing some change right now. And as I said this is very rate sensitive, buyers especially. I think that the main problem, if I'm trying to look ahead into 2025 and 2026, the fundamental problem in this country is supply. Because of a decade of underbuilding between 2020 and pretty much now, there's not enough inventory. There's a lot of demand. Demand can be low or high based on interest rates. But I think that once that demand hits the market and wants to buy a home, there's just not enough inventory. Now add to that the fact that a lot of homeowners are just locked in mortgages that are below 4% or 3% or 5%; that even decreases inventory further. So I think that that inventory, structural inventory problem is not going to go away anytime soon. It'll take years. I don't think that the government is doing enough, by the way, to incentivize developers to bring more inventory ito the market. So, I think that even when rates will go down and there will be more demand from buyers, I think that we might go back to somewhat of a situation of bidding wars, increasing home prices, very, very tough affordability. And I think that this is something that regulators have to attend to. So Real has been EBITDA positive now for two quarters. Gross margin's around 9%-10%. EBITDA margin is between 1%-2%. How should investors think about the long-term margin opportunity at Real? And what are the big drivers of margin expansion? The way we are looking at it is we build the brokerage piece of the business in order to bring in transactions, real estate transactions into this funnel. Now we're starting to think about or execute on monetization. So obviously on the brokerage piece margins are low, as you said, 9%-10%. On title as I said we have over 80% gross margins on mortgage. It's around 50%. Obviously the Wallet has amazing margins as well. So I think that the way investors should look at it is, OK, this is a company that grows very rapidly, attracts a lot of agents. Those agents bring in a massive volume of transactions. And now we monetize it with high margin services that we offer. I think that our targets in terms of gross margin is to be in the mid-teens, up to 20% within a few years. EBITDA margins of high single-digit% in the future. Then it becomes a game of attachment. How many services can you attach to one single transaction, to one single client? I think that it's pretty or a lot of it is technology dependent. So if you can create, for example, a consumer-facing app that makes the home buying so easy, so quick, so transparent, so enjoyable, buying a home right now is in many cases an awful experience. I don't know how many of you went through it. But if you had a way to search listings very easily, to schedule showings very easily, to apply for a mortgage very quickly and get a closing guarantee within 14 days. So you actually decide when you want to close on your home. You're not sitting at home waiting for your lender to tell you, OK, we're ready and have no ability to actually plan your life. If you have all of the documents in one place, if you have education on what you're going to go through, if you can purchase home insurance in that same place, if title is just checking the box and not dealing with different stakeholders and parties, if everything becomes simple I think that that could drive a lot of adoption to our ancillary services. So I think that technology is key here. Great. Can you talk about capital allocation priorities? What are your thoughts around acquisition opportunities? And then do you see opportunities to return capital to shareholders through buybacks and/or dividends? Yeah. I mean, we do have a buyback in place, by the way. Obviously, at some point we will want to offer dividends. We have made three acquisitions so far. All of them were tech companies. One was a tech company in the mortgage space. One was a tech company in the title space. One was more of an acqui-hire. I think that if I'm looking at our landscape a few years ago, the dinosaurs or the large players in the brokerage industry were looking to make acquisitions in the tech space. So, for example, RE/MAX acqui-hired a company called booj that had technology. And RE/MAX was trying to implement that technology in their business, which, by the way, failed. I think that what is likely to happen is if a platform like ours knows how to monetize transactions in multiple ways in high margin services all of a sudden it becomes a game of how can we attract more transactions? Because we know how to monetize them. We know how to process them extremely efficiently without spending a lot of money. So how can we attract more transactions? And that could position us as a possible acqui-hirer of one of those traditional businesses. And I know it's kind of out of the box. But I think it makes sense to think about the evolution of the industry in that way. So that's one way of potential capital allocation. Obviously the Real Wallet is a great way to use our balance sheet for us to be able to lend it. Our mortgage company currently operates as a mortgage broker. We do have banking licenses or lending licenses in different states. We do not want to go into direct lending under mortgages just because of the risk. But I do think that there might be cases in which we will need to bridge some situations for consumers. And maybe we will use our balance sheet for that again if it makes sense and if the underwriting is right. But I think that historically we've been very responsible in how we manage cash and how we manage expenses in general. This is why we turned profitable in the most difficult year for real estate in the past two decades. But I just think that there will be a lot of opportunities just because of the fact that we are dealing with the single largest asset class in the world. And we're trying to optimize it. Obviously there will be a lot of ways to grow. Great. Let me just pause to see if there are any more questions from investors. All right. Can you just talk about growth rates from a secular basis then as you think about the funnel and the real estate commission piece? When you think about each bigger bucket of services, real estate commissions what are the growth rates? And what are kind of the associated margins then for each of those buckets? And then second question would be just on geographical mix. It seems like you're kind of going more U.S. And it'll be interesting to hear the kind of relative growth rates there as well. Yeah. So let's start with the geographical growth. So we operate in all 50 states plus D.C. and 4 provinces in Canada. We're not intending to go anywhere else in the foreseeable future. There is so much potential in North America that it would be just a defocus for us to try and go to Europe or Africa or Latin America. So we're here. Our biggest states by the way are in terms of agent count California, Texas, Utah, province of Alberta in Canada. And we're seeing that agent count growth in the rates of 80%, 90% per year. Obviously, on mortgage and title growth is higher just because those are nascent businesses. So it's easier to go from $1 million to $2 million than from $500 million to $1 billion. So we will continue to see mortgage and title outperform the brokerage growth in terms of percentage of growth. I would guess that in 2025 they will have a more substantial positive impact on our gross margins. But if we go through a typical transaction, which I think is a good exercise for now, let's say the typical commission on a real estate transaction is $10,000. Out of that we take 15% or if we factor in the cap that we have so our gross margins are, let's say, 9%. So we keep $900 out of that $10,000 commission. If we were to add a title policy to that transaction, that's an additional $3,000 at 80% margins. If there was a mortgage offered as well, we're looking at roughly $6,000 or so or $7,000 at 50% gross margins. So all of a sudden you're going from making $10,000 to making almost $20,000. And out of keeping $900 per transaction to keeping $6,000 per transaction or $5,000. So 7, 8, 9x the gross profit per transaction compared to what we have now. This is why I said that it will become a game of how much can we attach title and mortgage to every transaction. And then obviously the Wallet is just let's assume we at some point in time make $1 billion in gross commissions, in top line revenue. $900 million out of that could become possible credit that we can offer our agents. And let's say underwriting excludes a lot of scenarios. So let's say $300 million, $400 million out of that becomes potential credit that we can offer with an 18% annual APR and interchange fees. That's massive. Can you disclose attach rates? Currently? Yeah. No. We have not. On mortgage it's lower than 1%. On title I will distinguish between two cases. Title as a whole close to 1% at the moment. By the way that should pick up and become much more substantial. But what we've started doing is we started inviting our most successful teams to become partners in the title companies. So we created JVs. So they have an incentive to send their deals to the title company that they're partners in because they receive distributions of profit. And we are starting to see that scaling very rapidly. So the attach rates in the JVs are 70%, 70. It's still not reflected in the financials because it's something that we're just now starting to implement. But the ones that are already in place are showing very promising signs. What's the key to winning the title business? Why do you tend to win it? Why does it tend to go elsewhere? Title is very relationship based. So every agent has their mortgage person, title person. And they typically would give that deal to their title person because of two things. One, they know that that person can close the deal. Second, the title or mortgage company takes them out for dinners. Sometimes they go golfing with them. So it's relationships. But consumers couldn't care less about title. Nobody cares what their title company is because this is kind of a necessary evil. The way we look at title is title should just be a box check on the consumer app. So once a buyer is starting the process with us and we ask them, do you want to use Real Title? Because you can then close faster. Everything will be smoother. You will have a much better service. Then, sure, why not? For us we have to kind of overcome that personal relationship that agents have with a title person and try to productize it and try to win on service through technology and not through personal relationships. Great. Are there any other questions from investors? Super. Well, Tamir, thank you so much for being with us here today. We greatly appreciate it. Thanks as well to Michelle and Ravi. Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you everyone.