Good afternoon, welcome to the eXp World Holdings first quarter 2023 earnings fireside chat via live stream and EXPI Campus, our metaverse. My name is Denise Garcia, I manage investor relations at eXp World Holdings. Today, we will begin our earnings fireside chat with prepared remarks from Glenn Sanford, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of eXp World Holdings and CEO eXp Realty, followed by a review of the first quarter 2023 financial highlights presented by Jeff Whiteside, CFO, and Chief Collaboration Officer of eXp World Holdings. Following our prepared remarks, we'll open the call to Q&A session with eXp World Holdings covering analysts and questions submitted to eXp. First, let's begin with a review of the forward-looking statements. There'll be a number of forward-looking statements made today that should be considered in conjunction with cautionary statements contained in the company's SEC filings.
Forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. These forward-looking statements are based on assumptions as of today, May 2nd, 2023, and the company undertakes no obligation to revise or update them. Please see our filings with the SEC, including our most recently filed quarterly report on Form 10-Q, for a discussion of specific risks that may affect our business performance and financial condition. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded and a replay will also be made available on expworldholdings.com. Now for a few logistics, and we'll get started. For those of you joining the EXPI Campus today, to see all three screens, hit the stage Zoom button to the right of your chat box. To zoom into a specific screen, you can hit the plus icon above that screen.
If you happen to see no slides or a gray slide, hit the refresh, e.g., icon on the top right-hand corner of that screen to connect. While on eXp's campus, should you need any help or have questions, please enter your comments in the chat box at the bottom on the left and a member of the team will contact you. With Slido, should you wish to ask a question during our presentation, you can enter your questions by scanning the QR code presented on the screen. With your phone or go to slido.com and type in the event code EXPI. From there, you can submit a question or vote up an existing question by giving a thumbs up if you'd also like that question to be asked. This screen will remain up on the left-hand side of the stage.
Now, I'll turn the fireside chat over to Glenn and Jeff before opening the call to questions. Glenn.
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Denise, thank you everyone for showing up today. You know, we just finished our year-end report just a little over a month ago, today's gonna be a little bit of an update relative to Q1. Obviously, one of the things that we wanna just touch bases on is the fact that we've got really three companies. The one that we'll talk about the most today is eXp Realty because that, of course, is what got this started about 13 and a half years ago. We'll talk about a lot of the stats there. We'll touch briefly on Success. You know, it's a personal development brand.
We've just added a new CEO to that brand, Amy Somerville, who has a phenomenal background coming from both RE/MAX, Buffini & Company , and prior to that, she had actually has a degree in journalism, so it's a nice fit for her, and she's been doing a phenomenal job since she's joined us there just a couple months back. Virbela. Of course, this is a Virbela campus, one of many that Virbela hosts on behalf of clients. We, of course, bought Virbela back in 2018, and this is the enterprise version of the metaverse, but we also have a web-based version at framevr.io, which I encourage all of you to take a look at, because I think that's where a lot of the future is of the metaverse on the web, and we're doing a lot of great things there.
Let's just kinda jump into some initial highlights for Q1. We did grow over 87,000 agents in the quarter, which represents a 12% year-over-year growth for the year. Really, our big thing, and you hear me say this all the time, is we really are focused on the agent value proposition. We say that because at one point, I was an active agent in the field, with the struggles that agents go through, and there wasn't a real estate brokerage that really met the needs that I recognized for myself, and that's what put us on the path of building eXp Realty. International is actually growing quite rapidly.
You'll see, you certainly can note in the, both the financial statements and the press release, but international has been growing at a rapid rate, with, you know, 52% year-over-year revenue growth. We've got our retention strong. The agents that we do lose, almost half of them are agents who have done zero transactions. That's, you know, worth noting. You know, our biggest attrition is in the category of zero to two sales a year, and that makes about 75% of all of our attrition. We may touch on it a little bit later if we get some questions, but we've got a little bit of a breakdown of the, that cohort, by different segment.
We're seeing a lot of brokerages and agent teams joining eXp. We'll also, you know, highlight a few of them. There was a press release put out earlier today. You can see many of those teams and brokerages that have made the switch over. We've got a number of them that even the beginning of this quarter are joining, which are very notable in their own right, that we haven't put press releases out for. You know, we did a lot of cost-cutting last year. I know Jeff will go into this, but it was nice to see that even in what's historically the worst quarter of the year, we were able to actually have a little bit of net income, and our adjusted EBITDA was positive.
A lot of good things going on in the quarter, just from sort of a top-level perspective. All this really comes down to, you know, how do we focus on the agent value prop? With that, let's go on to the next slide. This last year, and of course, this plays out into Q1 especially, because interest rates really started to go up in late Q1, early Q2 last year. That's when, you know, interest rates started to really tick up. That has put a drag on the housing market, a significant drag, so much so that, you know, real estate sides in the quarter, depending on the data, and we've got, you know, some footnotes here as to where the data came from.
you know, transaction sides were down about 25% year-over-year for Q1. Our agents in the industry are down about 0.3%. Not a huge amount, but there's a lot of agents who are still members of NAR but have effectively opted out. I believe that that number is actually larger than 0.3%. That's what NAR stats are showing in terms of people just renewing their and continuing to pay NAR dues. Our agent count in the U.S., and this is just U.S. data, we're really comparing it against the NAR data for the most part, is up 8.3% in the U.S. Of course, we're about 12% overall, and we make up about 4.9% of all realtors in the United States.
We grew our agent base relative to on a market share basis by about close to 9% this last year. One of the things we've talked about in the past, and really the last year or so, we've talked about the fact that in a down market, we believed we would pick up market share, and we wanted to switch the, you know, the focus from just pure growth to market share growth, just given the backdrop of what we thought 2022, early 2023 would look like. Our transaction sides were down about 16%, but our market share relative to transaction size, we believe, is around 4.1% plus or minus, which means that our market share grew about 11.6% last year.
We fundamentally feel that that's going to be a continued direction that we'll see in the soft market. You know, in Q2, we'll see how it compares. My guess is that industry-wide will still be down Q2, maybe Q3, we believe that we'll continue to grow market share. When we come out the other side of this, we'll be in great shape to reap the rewards of a much improved market. Let's go ahead and go to the next slide. This next slide is really just a little bit more of what you saw maybe in the press release earlier today. We've got a lot of top teams and brokerages that are continuing to join us.
This is just a bit of highlights for that. If you're subscribing to any of the real estate publications, it's hard not to notice the fact that eXp continues to grow its market share, whether it be signs on the ground in local neighborhoods or whether it be in the press. Some more of the press accolades are on the next slide, which, you know, this year, the RealTrends, which is, you know, does a lot of this trends reporting. They've been doing it for many, many years. eXp ranked number one in four categories, number of sides, top mover in sides, top mover in volumes, and the top independent brokerage.
One, that we haven't really focused on in the past, but is one that's worth noting is the Direct Selling News, which is a publication that's primarily focused on the direct selling industry. We have got bucketed into their tracking because of the unique way that we comp real estate agents. We actually give agents the ability to attract other agents into eXp and earn income as if they were the broker owner, without having to put up all the market, the capital in order to grow their business. And that's akin to direct selling or network marketing. As a result, this last three years in a row, we've been recognized as the fastest growing company, using a direct sales style comp model for our independent contractors.
You know, it's a nice award to have. The one we're most proud of is the Glassdoor award. Six years in a row, we've been ranked in the top 100 best places to work. Last year, 2022, we were actually ranked in the top 5, which is an incredible ranking. For those of you who follow Glassdoor and long-term performance of companies that have high Glassdoor scores, it's a good company to be in, especially when you think about it from a perspective of long-term shareholder. One quote that's also unique on this slide is the one that Steve Murray gives. It's notable that eXp was the only one of top firms that grew both its closed transaction and sales volume in 2022.
Of course, we're seeing that market share continue to grow. With that, you know, we wanna just talk a little bit about some of the innovations that we're working on. Some of these you've heard about, some of the focus you've heard about in the past. Our focus on NPS is a big one for us. We've been focused on NPS as a key performance indicator since 2015, 2016 when we introduced it to the company at large. This last year especially, our teams have really picked it up across the organization in multiple different areas. We've got more areas of the company that are ranked at a 70 or higher, which is a number that we've used historically, to recognize if we're at a 70 or above, things are going really well.
So we're at about a 70 on our global agent Net Promoter Score. We are actually bringing Fred Reichheld, the author of the Net Promoter Score, and a more recent book, Winning on Purpose, to our Shareholder Summit here later on this month. In terms of products and support, we did a press release earlier this year talking about a partnership that we put together with Realty.com with some exclusive benefits. We now have over 10,000 qualified leads each month going into hands of eXp agents. We're working with Realty.com to help them grow their footprint, but also in relation to our exclusive partnership benefits. Additionally, they've introduced coaches and trainers that are actually supporting eXp agents over and above just supporting and managing the existing lead flow.
We're getting some great partnership benefits that are helping all eXp agents excel. We're continuing to work on that partnership to expand it to create more opportunities for agents. We're also using that as an analog for some of the things that we're doing with Zoocasa and with eXpRealty.com. We'll be talking about a couple things here in just over, little over two weeks that we're really excited to share around some of the innovations that we're doing on the portal side of the business. I mentioned that Amy Somerville, she was the VP of Leadership Development over at RE/MAX, went on to Buffini & Company, and now she's with us. Great background.
Came out of journalism, and before she went into real estate, and is a big proponent of the SUCCESS magazine brand, had a lot of connection to it while she was at RE/MAX, and now really doing some great things over the last 30, 60 days that she's been with us on the SUCCESS side. We're excited about that. The new thing that we're doing here on this slide is we're introducing eXp Ventures. eXp Ventures is a internal venture fund that we're putting together where we're investing in strategic and synergistic products and services that we believe are going to be good into the future. We're formalizing that.
Kyle Kittleson on our team is, has been evaluating many different products and services over time, but we're actually turning that into its own division, where it's going to actually be seeking out those products and services, especially at these valuations, we think are going to bode well for the future. The amount of change that's going on right now in terms of technology enhancements, AI, et cetera, eXp Ventures wants to play a role in doing that. With that, let me go ahead and turn it over to Jeff Whiteside, and he can kind of talk through the financial highlights for Q1.
All right. Glenn, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you, Glenn. Thank you to mi. I think one thing you didn't mention, Glenn, was the new avatars that we have, the new look. I know a lot of people were looking for my green, but we really like the baby blue. Thanks, Alex and the team, for that. You know, the campus is in great shape. What I'd like to do today is on the first slide, and I'll review our Q1 highlights, followed by segment results and results on a consolidated basis. Starting with the highlights for the quarter. At the world holding level, our revenue was $850.6 million.
We did decrease 16% compared to last year, this was due to both the transactions and average selling prices decreasing year-over-year. Our gross profit decreased by 12%, the margin improved by 33 basis points to 8.6%. We generated a positive net income, as Glenn mentioned, of $1.5 million. We generated adjusted EBITDA of $13.3 million and operating cash flow of $38.8 million. As we discussed when we began the segment reporting in Q4, eXp in North America represents a majority of total revenue at 98%, North America Realty's revenue also decreased 16% this quarter. That's, you know, it's most of the revenue we have.
We have the North American Realty's revenue, you know, as Glenn pointed out, it is lower. As we compare it to the marketplace, we decreased a lot less than the marketplace did. I got some stats on that. One thing that did happen, as Glenn mentioned, is that even though there was a decrease in transactions, we also had an increase in share gain and positive EBITDA, which reflects the resiliency in the model in a down market. International this quarter, we grown revenue at 52%. You know, we had strength in our companies like South Africa, Australia, the U.K., recordly quarterly revenues in Portugal and Spain. I'll review the Q1 financials for each segment on the next slide, please.
As a reminder, we started breaking out segment financials in Q4 of 2022. On this slide, you can see that our Q1 2023 segment revenue and adjusted EBITDA for each of our four business segments and a breakout of corporate allocations. Our North American Realty segment is again the primary driver of revenue at $837 million and adjusted EBITDA of $21.2 million. Despite a very challenging environment in the first quarter, North American revenue declined over 6% year-over-year versus an industry-wide sales decline of 25%, and North American Realty remained profitable. International Realty had a record quarter, increasing revenue by 52% to $10.8 million. Virbela increased revenue by 19% and improved its EBITDA loss by approximately $1.5 million when you compare it to last year this time.
Our other segment, which is primarily SUCCESS, grew revenue at 100%. While improving EBITDA losses year-over-year. Overall, you know, it was a extremely challenging quarter for the entire industry, and the segments did perform, and especially, you know, the powerhouse that we have in the North American side performed very well in this particular market. On our next slide, I'll review financial details on a consolidated basis. We maintain a strong agent NPS, as Glenn mentioned, at 70, and agent count increased 12% the prior year. Revenue decreased -16%. Gross margin dollars decreased -12% due to lower transaction volume and lower price. Our gross margin percentage increased 4% or 33 basis points year-over-year.
SG&A costs decreased due to a slowdown in hiring, as Glenn mentioned, this is in previous periods, and a reallocation of agent growth incentive stock compensation expense to commissions and other agent-related costs. Net income was a positive $1.5 million, generated $13.3 million of adjusted EBITDA. Our operating cash flow was $38 million, and we ended the quarter with $122 million of cash and cash equivalents. On my final slide that I have for the first quarter, what we see is just taking a step backwards and, you know, I really like to look at what the company's accomplished though from a historical perspective, growing our agents and our revenue consistently since 2017.
Chart reflects how recent market conditions have impacted revenue, which we expected in this quarter. We continue to increase eXp agent count, which grew 12% year-over-year, this quarter. We continue to generate positive cash flow with zero debt on the balance sheet and a very healthy cash balance. With that, I'll turn that back over to Denise and for Q&A.
Thanks, Jeff. I'll kick off with a question for Glenn before we open up the call to our covering analysts. Glenn, can you share your thoughts on your first quarter back as CEO of eXp and what you're hearing from agents about the broader market?
January third came back as in the role of CEO. It definitely has been a roll up the sleeve, especially the first two and a half months of just reorienting the agent-centric model a little bit. Just obviously every CEO is gonna have a slightly different focus. You know, one of the things I'm hearing not as much negative in the marketplace from an agent perspective relative to sales volumes. Part of it's probably seasonal because March is historically the beginning of the selling season. Those who are feeling it, taking it on the chin last year, you know, through the midyear and the summer and the fall, they've adjusted to the new normal.
I believe that we're now fully into the new normal, in terms of sales volumes and those types of things. Now it will be more of a steady growth. I think once we get into especially Q3, Q4, we'll actually start to see year-over-year growth rates is my guess, and I think agents are starting to pick that up as well.
Got it. Okay. We'll take our first question from John Campbell. John, I think your mic's open.
Yeah. Good afternoon, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. Jeff, on the OpEx, obviously, that dropped a good bit from 4Q. I think you called out a reallocation of some of the stock-based comp, moving that to the cost of revenues. That kind of explains the, I guess the lower gross margin sequentially. Maybe if you could help quantify that impact and help us get a better grip on what that, I guess under the prior accounting, what that OpEx would have looked like this quarter relative to last?
Yeah. We're talking about a year-over-year, John. It was approximately about $7.8 million. That was a difference quarter-over-quarter.
Got it.
That was the change. It's just, I mean, what's happened is that, you know, it's just looking at, you know, how to classify different accounts. We do this on a relatively regular basis, and this is just a change we decided to make as a company.
Okay. Makes sense. Then, Glenn, I mean, I saw the press release this morning where you guys were highlighting, you know, the flurry of agent additions, and you spoke to this briefly just a second ago. From what you've gathered from those teams, I know you tend to get involved in some of these recruiting efforts, but from what you've gathered from those teams that joined the platform, was there a common theme cited as the why and why now, you know, as far as making that switch? Is, you know, is there anything new in the eXp model that kind of drove that decision to make the move now?
No, I think we're continuing to work on building out, you know, partnerships and relationships with various folks. We definitely can provide certain benefits that's tough for other companies to provide because we're one large brokerage. We're starting to get a, we'll call it an over indexing, referral-based business opportunities. That means that agents and brokers that are affiliated with eXp are going to get those types of opportunities.
I don't know that that's fundamentally recognized in the marketplace, but the reality is that when certain large scale vendors have one conversation with Leo and our Revenos division, and they can now have a home for hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of potential leads as versus going through a more franchise model or a system that's significantly smaller, we think that there's certainly opportunities there. We do know that there are some agents that literally knew about some of those relationships coming over and some agents made moves because of that. I don't know that it's a huge, huge factor, but we're just continuing to help agents do more business is really what it comes down to. Our overall value prop is resonating well.
A lot of offices, by the way, are reducing their costs, closing down, they've merged, or they're getting ready to do something. I think that's also created an opportunity for them to get ahead of that and make the move first versus waiting for their office or brokerage or brand to switch to some other model. There's some opportunistic moves as well.
Okay, that's great color. Thanks, Glenn. Thanks, Jeff.
John?
Yeah.
We'll take our next question from Tom White from D.A. Davidson.
Great. Thanks for taking my question. Love the snazzy new avatars. Maybe just a follow-up on the G&A kind of OpEx question. I guess, you know, even adjusting for that reclass, you know, it's still a very kinda nice downtick quarter-over-quarter in G&A. You know, I realize you guys kind of wanna remain nimble and flexible, and if you see interesting kind of investment opportunities, you know, you may move quickly, but just can you help us think about like the durability or like, you know, is this kind of a good level to think about over the next few quarters in terms of modeling? Just secondarily, I may have missed it, but I'm not sure I heard much discussion about SUCCESS Lending, Glenn.
Just curious if you can kinda give an update on what's happening there.
Yeah. I mean, I can take the question on the SG&A. Yeah, as you're aware, I mean, we didn't go into like a full cut all the costs type thing. We wanted to support our agents. We wanted to invest, and we did. Okay. We did recognize the downturn, halfway through last year, slowed down the hiring. Okay. What we do see, as Glenn mentioned, I mean, we do see it coming back. As, as you know, we don't know exactly when that's gonna happen, towards the end of the year is kind of what the forecasts are kinda looking like. Those numbers will go up, but I don't think they're gonna go up dramatically, Tom, over the year.
Again, you know, as we've said from the get-go, if we see opportunity to make the investments in staff and support and NPS, we're gonna do that. It, you know, I think we are seeing a pretty good effect of adjusting last year. You know, I think when you look at this SG&A number now too, it's probably a better representation of what we're really spending in the business to run the business. And that will be like that going forward.
Yeah. Relative to SUCCESS Lending, one of the things that, you know, obviously we saw interest rates go up. That's the big drag on the housing market. I think that lending's still in a little bit of a challenging spot, but I feel like we're at the turning or we're gonna turn the corner here in the next quarter, probably by Q3, to start to actually see it, actually be accretive to eXp. Right now it's a little bit of an expense item while we're building out the nationwide infrastructure, and we started it at what could be considered the right time or the wrong time, depending on how you look at it. We're, we're well positioned to be able to actually start to get benefits.
We're running loans through it at, you know, there's 30, 40, 50, maybe 100 loans going through it a month, depending on the month. I expect that's gonna just continue to grow. As we get toward the end of the year, we expect that there's to be more uptake into those services.
Okay. maybe I'll squeeze in one last one if I could. You know, in the press release and also in the, kinda the presentation, Glenn, you know, you touched on kinda iterating on the agent value prop. You know, it sounds like at least for this year, and kinda given the market backdrop, you know, what you're kinda really talking about there is trying to like drive more leads and just help these guys kinda generate more business via leads and partnerships in that way. I guess if you look out like 2 or 3 years, you know, and think about all the different things that kinda go into the agent value prop from leads to technology to just like, you know, the compensation model. Where do you see, you know...
Where do you think kind of the most likely areas that are likely to see kind of meaningful kind of evolution or improvements, you know, in terms of ways for you guys to add value to agents, you know, kind of across those buckets maybe?
Yeah. Well, first and foremost, obviously lead gen's gonna be the thing that's gonna be most meaningful for agents. You know, we're in a unique backdrop in that, you know, we didn't mention it yet in this call, so I'll just mention it because we're not talking about AI, we're probably missing the ball. We just ended up having an offsite last week, where we were looking at, you know, how is AI going to impact our business, and could it bring the cost to operate down? We think that would be the case long term. As we look at, you know, different technologies.
If we can drive down the cost of the brokerage, then there's, in theory, opportunities to drive down some of the costs from an agent perspective while providing the same or better benefits. That's kind of the way we're thinking about it. You know, one of the other conversations, and this is so you kind of at least know what's in my head. I think about long-term enterprise value being to some extent, market share driven. For us, it's still very much of how do we continue to build this to get to a more meaningful market share so that, you know, in a number of years, we'll be able to look back and go that, you know, we did get to whatever the number is, 500,000 agents or more worldwide.
Part of it is making sure that our value prop does in fact attract agents while not fundamentally losing money as a company to get there. We think once we get to, again, what we call worldwide scale, you know, we're investing international. That's, you know, that's our biggest investments in the business. Then there'll be a lot of opportunities for other opportunities for revenue. We kinda see it as being all of the above over time, you know, create more efficiencies, create better engagement, lead generation efforts, and then translating that into, you know, better economics for agents over time.
Great. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Great. Thanks, Tom. We'll go to our next question from Matt Filek from William Blair.
Hey, Glenn and Jeff, you have Matt Filek on for Stephen Sheldon. Thank you for taking my questions. Wanted to start with one on the international front. When do you think you could reach break even or positive adjusted EBITDA there? Or the focus remain mostly on growth as we think about the next few years, given the size of the opportunity. Curious on how you're thinking about that.
What we haven't done is we haven't broken out the individual countries in the breakout of international. There's obviously. We believe that over time, we'll grow to, you know, somewhere close to 100 countries. From that perspective, there's a lot of investment to get into all those countries. At the same time, the U.K., I believe, actually has to do filings in the U.K., even as a company inside of eXp, where it's, you know, it's actually profitable. We've some other countries that are close to or there already. We think about international as not being one big bucket. We think about it as there's a number of countries that are in that bucket.
Each country is going to get to, you know, net net profitability at different times, and we wanna just continue to invest and reinvest, so we can eventually get to all of those countries. We're really not focused on making international profitable as an overall group, and at a particular time, but more focused on the countries in that we do launch, focused on can we get to those to profitability in, you know, 18 months or so, which is in. When the market was going strong, we believed that that was actually the timeframe. Now it's probably a little bit longer. It's probably 24 months or so just in the current backdrop. We still think that, you know, each country has a path to net net profitability in not a significant length of time.
We have, as maybe noted, we haven't talked about it, but we haven't launched as many new countries lately, and part of that is actually to work on the international formula to get more countries to profitability quicker and figuring what are the best practices that have been working. Then also just given the backdrop, we slowed down just to be financially responsible with the monies that we have in hand, prior to going back into growth mode.
Got it. Thank you. A very helpful color. Can gears a little bit here. Given the large professional development TAM that SUCCESS Coaching is addressing, was wondering if you could talk about the monetization strategy there, longer term vision for SUCCESS Coaching, and what performance with that initiative has looked like so far.
On SUCCESS, I would say that with Amy joining us on the CEO role, I got firsthand visibility into what she's doing. She's rebuilding the entire SUCCESS ecosystem from the ground up. We have some partnerships and things that we're gonna be announcing at shareholders for agent coaching initiatives and courses and all of that specifically for real estate. We'll also be focusing on the broader personal development industry over time. Her specialty is real estate, real estate coaching and professional development. That's where the first focus is gonna be, and while still maintaining the more open brand of SUCCESS to the larger personal development community. It's still, it's early stages.
I would say that probably by the end of Q2, when we have this conversation, I'll be able to provide you more color as to what's going on with SUCCESS.
That sounds great. We'll be looking forward to it. That's it for me. I'll jump back in the queue here.
All right. Thanks, Matt. Now we'll move on to questions from the audience, but before I do, I'll repeat the instructions in case we have other folks that wanna get on to Slido and ask a question. You can go to the furthest screen on the left, and with your phone, scan the QR code there. Or you can go to slido.com and type in the event code EXPI to submit a question or vote up existing questions. For now, I'll take a question from David Marsh. He's an eXp associate broker and a shareholder. He noted in today's press release, the company repurchased approximately $29.9 million of common stock during the 1st quarter of 2023. Do we have a total share count repurchased?
Just give me one second. I'll get on that, if you wanna just move forward a little bit.
Yep. Again, if you'd like to ask a question, you can go to slido.com, either by scanning the QR code on the upper left-hand screen, or sorry, or the QR code in the upper left-hand part of the screen, or you can go to slido.com and enter in the event code, EXPI.
Any other questions there, Denise, while we're waiting for Jeff?
No, I don't see any on Slido.
Okay. Any more questions from the covering analysts? Otherwise, obviously, we'll wait for Jeff's research.
I can hop in there, Glenn. Maybe talk a little bit about Zoocasa and specifically, what the model there is, you know, in terms of, lead gen, whether that's the kind of exact model that you envision kind of, you know, bringing here and, you know, is there an explicit kinda direct revenue opportunity for eXp World Holdings or is it, you know, mostly about just, you know, generating leads for agents that obviously the company will benefit from if transactions get done. I'm just curious whether there's also kind of an added revenue opportunity if you guys, you know, can kind of more directly monetize that with your agents.
Yeah, there definitely is. When we purchased Zoocasa last year, they were, you know, 150 agents, primarily in the Toronto, Ontario market area, with a nationally recognized portal in terms of Canada. They ran it as basically a team-based brokerage where agents were on a 50/50 split on the leads that were generated in the Toronto metro area. One of the ideas was, you know, it generated a number of leads across Canada. Calgary is a big market. Vancouver, Edmonton, and other markets in Canada where they were generating leads, but they weren't actually monetizing those leads.
The switch of the model has been to actually move the Zoocasa agents into what has been referred to as gen pop or the general population of eXp agents. They're now eXp agents. However, the referral fee, that was originally at 50%, I think, is now dropped down to 35%, which is consistent with most portals across the real estate ecosystem. Now those leads are going out to those agents at the 35% referral, but they're also going to agents in other markets across Canada at a 35% referral. We have Zoocasa partner agents that are actually joining the Zoocasa referral network, then they're able to receive these leads in a high accountability, high conversion, based infrastructure with coaching and training as well.
now Zoocasa is working on actually moving into the US. Zoocasa will be actually generating leads in different markets in the US, and it'll actually create those same partnership opportunities where you can become a Zoocasa partner agent. Be able to work those leads. This falls under a larger umbrella, which we refer to as Revenos, which is, you know, Leo Pareja and others are involved in where we're aggregating a large number of leads from lots of different sources. Zoocasa and our internal, what we refer to as inside sales agents team or ISA team, are having initial conversations, chat threads, et cetera, with prospective clients that are coming in from many different sources.
Zoocasa has actually expanded its offering from just the lead gen that they do through zoocasa.com to also being lead cultivation in partnership with some of our some of our different lead providers. That's creating new revenue opportunities from a lot of these other services. When we start to look at Zoocasa, the other lead services, many of them we're under NDA with, so I don't mention them by name in case I mention one I'm not supposed to mention.
We've got a number of lead source opportunities that are now funneling into our sort of back end of Zoocasa and the back end of sort of eXp Realty.com and pushing, you know, large numbers of leads in the, you know, tens of thousands of leads a month that we're getting, that we're putting into that overall ecosystem where we're generating a little bit extra revenue in managing that lead flow on behalf of our agents.
Great. Thanks, Glenn. We have another question from the audience, wanted to let everyone know that the answer from Jeff regarding the number of shares repurchased in the quarter is in the chat, it was $2.3 million. I'll go to a question from anonymous. Will there be pent-up demand in Q4 and Q1 when the interest rate cycle hopefully starts trending down, that eXp might not be able to service due to cost cuttings?
It shouldn't. You know, we did cut costs last year, for sure. Part of it's because we recognized that we were gonna have a slower market. The other side is that we've actually been, you know, hiring to keep up with demand. We obviously have grown our staff when we were growing at, you know, 30%, 50%, 100% year-over-year in the past. We actually have a better team, better workflows. We also now have a more global workforce as well. We have a lot of sort of we'll call back office functions, you know, are starting to be served in markets where we can flex up and down staff.
We have the forward-facing, agent-facing staff, which is generally in the market that those agents are in. Then we have, you know, the ability to flex up and down with some of the more repetitive type activities, whether it be on the accounting, transaction, calculations and other things. Then we're also, as mentioned earlier, we're looking at, you know, where does technology play a role or where does AI and machine learning play a role in helping us with scale as well. I don't feel like we'll have any issue. In fact, if you think about Q4, Q1 specifically, those tend to be slower quarters. It's really, you know, it's Q2, Q3 next year when most likely we'll see the biggest amount of increase.
We typically will staff in advance of what we're seeing in the data.
Great. All right, I'll move on to the next question from the audience. Chris Darren asked, "Is there any foresight on agent count for this year and/or goals of the company to grow the number of agents at eXp for 2023?
What we noted was obviously the market share gains and the numbers. You know, when you're, when you're fighting the headwinds that we're fighting at the moment with agents either leaving the business or fundamentally leaving, even if they're not leaving NAR membership, that's, that does play a little bit. It's a little tougher to grow through that. We've been talking about the idea of around 95,000 agents at the end of the year. Based on just our current trajectory, I mean, same numbers you, you're looking at as well, you know, that might even be slightly optimistic for year-end, depending on how international goes. You know, Canada, we're, you know, on the verge of, I think, breaking over 6,000 agents.
I think the international is really gonna be where we get the most growth, in the balance of 2023. I think U.S. is got the most headwinds, that's where, you know, we still think we'll grow, but it's not gonna be as much as certainly we've done in past years. That's kinda where we're sitting.
Great. All right. Well, sorry, we need to end it here, wanted to remind everyone that eXp Shareholder Summit will take place May 17th through 20th in Orlando, Florida. You can register at eXp Shareholder Summit to join us at the event. As always, please stay connected by visiting expworldholdings.com for the latest updates on eXp news, results, and events. You'll also find a recording of this call in our latest investor presentation on the Investors section of the site. Thank you for joining me today. This concludes the eXp World Holdings first quarter 2023