Good day, and welcome to the Fathom Holdings first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing Star, then zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press Star then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press Star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Roger Pondel with PondelWilkinson. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Matt, and welcome everyone to Fathom Holdings 2022 first quarter conference call. I'm Roger Pondel with PondelWilkinson, Fathom's investor relations firm. It is my pleasure today to introduce the company's founder and Chief Executive Officer, Josh Harley, and Fathom's President and Chief Financial Officer, Marco Fregenal. Before I turn things over to Josh, I want to remind all listeners that today's call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements are subject to numerous conditions, many of which are beyond the company's control, including those set forth in the Risk Factors section of the company's latest Form 10-K and subsequent Form 10-Qs and other company filings made with the SEC, copies of which are available on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov.
As a result of those forward-looking statements, actual results could differ materially, and Fathom undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements after today's call, except as required by law. Please also note that during this call, management will be discussing adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure, as defined by SEC Regulation G. A reconciliation of this non-GAAP financial measure to the most recently comparable GAAP measure is included in today's press release, which is now posted on Fathom's website. With that, I will turn things over to Josh Harley. Josh?
Thank you, Roger, and of course, thank you to everyone who's on today's call. Our entire team deeply appreciate your support and of course, your faith in us. You know, before we review the significant business and financial progress Fathom has made since our last call, I want to thank our agents and our employees for their unwavering hard work and success, in moving us forward toward our vision and of course, in helping us grow as a company. Quarter after quarter, our results continue to demonstrate the power of our truly disruptive business model. I'm proud to be here sharing the reasons why we have, and believe we'll continue to, achieve significant growth. We're winning through innovation and by delivering real long-term value to our agents, our employees, our clients, and our shareholders.
Now, the latest RealTrends brokerage rankings that came out reported that Fathom Realty is now the sixth largest independent real estate brokerage in America, and the tenth-largest brokerage overall, which includes franchises. Over the last four years, we've jumped from the sixteenth spot to the eleventh to the ninth, and now the sixth largest. That's by the way, that's for a very good reason why we're skyrocketing up the chart, namely due to the fact that the value we provide agents who join Fathom is unmatched by our peers. I once heard someone state that an agent's commission split only matters in the absence of value. What if all things were equal in regard to technology and resource support, et cetera? Splits matter a lot. That's why I believe we're winning.
There's really nothing outside of empty offices that our peers can give their agents that we cannot, and yet we can offer everything to our agents for a fraction of the cost. In fact, the average agent who joins Fathom saves between $12,000-$15,000 per year. Today, our industry is seeing a softening. While this softening may prove to be a headwind for our peers, we believe that we can turn it into a tailwind for us. Where else are agents going to recoup their lost income if they close fewer homes? If an agent is on a 70-30 split and closes 20% fewer homes, the simple act of moving over to Fathom will increase their take-home income by around 9%.
Now, nobody's suggesting the market will see a 20% dip, and I was merely presenting a worst-case scenario example, but you can see how our model can be even more disruptive to our peers in a down market. For the first quarter, year over year, our revenue grew by 81.4%. Our agent count grew by more than 49%, and our transactions grew by over 47%. Importantly, for the first-fourth quarter in a row, our real estate business was adjusted EBITDA profitable. I don't believe that any other public real estate brokerage can make that claim. And with a long runway ahead of us, we feel very confident in our business, even in today's economic uncertainty.
While we're continuing to invest capital to enhance our foundation for sustained long-term growth of our newer business lines, those investment dollars are quickly becoming a smaller percentage of our ongoing expenses. We believe that Fathom is on track to continue strong revenue, agent, and transaction growth. And with the strategic thoughtful investments we're making in each of our business lines, we look forward to also demonstrating profitability, which is a high priority for us. Now, a lot of companies sacrifice profitability for growth, but I'm proud to say that we do not have to operate that way. We believe that we can achieve strong profits over time while continuing to grow our business at high rates. Our cash position is strong, and we plan to continue to focus on achieving positive operational cash flow.
Marco, our President and CFO, does a great job in pressing the proverbial no button, keeping our spending in check. Now as we march toward profitability. Our steadfast discipline allows us to be good stewards of the money with which you've entrusted us. Despite the current state of the stock market and what some believe to be a headwind in the broad real estate sector, as I mentioned, we believe that Fathom is on track to continue an impressive growth rate while also achieving profitability quickly. We look forward to proving it, and I'd like to share with you how we'll achieve those goals.
Now, since going public, we have substantially increased revenue, continued the expansion of our agent network, maintained strong agent retention, which we believe is the best in the industry, entered new geographic markets and completed strategic acquisitions designed to further solidify our market position and accelerate our path to profitability. That's a lot to accomplish in less than two years of being public, but it demonstrates our focus, our commitment, and our ability to get things done. Now, with the addition of our own in-house mortgage, title, and insurance companies, along with additional SaaS product offerings, we have the potential to significantly increase our revenue and importantly, our profitability per transaction as we continue to integrate those operations into each of our markets. Now, as I mentioned earlier, we grew our agent count by more than 49% year-over-year.
We believe a big part of that growth is because Fathom continues to have one of the most attractive agent commission plans and one of the most complete offerings in the industry. When it comes to providing the greatest value to agents, we believe Fathom wins hands down. One of the best parts of our extraordinary agent growth is that our cost to acquire one agent during Q1 remained at approximately $990, making our break even on each agent less than the $1,100 we earn on their very first sale. I also want to point out that the average lifetime value of an agent is currently over $21,000 on just the real estate side of the business.
The ratio of that lifetime value to our cost of agent acquisition is more than 21x, and that does not take into account the revenue we're generating from our mortgage, title, and insurance companies, or potential revenue from leads that we can generate for our agents. We believe that Fathom is in a unique position to maintain our solid growth rate through 2022, even at a time when the broad real estate market is turbulent. Fathom can prove to be a hedge against other real estate brokerages whose revenue, transactions, and agent count could suffer from industry headwinds. I want to spend just a minute on this point because I think it's critical to better understand this. While the overall real estate industry outlook is not exactly ideal, there are a few important things to remember.
First, homes are still selling faster than what is typical in a normal market. In April, around 57% of homes were under contract within two weeks, and around 43% of homes were under contract within one week. Additionally, around 55% of homes were sold for above listing price. One more stat that I believe adds an additional level of confidence is the fact that rents are also rising at a high rate, which keeps homeownership attractive relative to renting. I'm not suggesting these metrics are not off their tops, but these tops were pretty high to begin with. The biggest concern moving forward is really housing affordability, right? For April, home prices were up 15% year-over-year. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate was up 67%. Of course, inflation has not been kind to households across the country.
With all that said, there's still far more demand than inventory. Inventory is still not near historic lows, and while some are beginning to be priced out of the market, there's still more demand than the market can satisfy. On top of that, interest rates are not that far off normal. Prior to 2010, seeing interest rates in the 5%-7% range was the norm. Another point I want to make here is that even if we as an industry see fewer homes sold throughout 2022 as compared to 2021, we Fathom feel confident that our agent and transaction growth will outperform any decrease in the number of transactions for the industry as a whole.
While these market conditions are not good for the majority of real estate companies, and as I mentioned earlier, Fathom offers real estate agents who join us from other brokerages the ability to net more income than they did even in 2021, even if they sell fewer homes. That could result in more agents joining Fathom if or perhaps when they begin to feel the squeeze. There are only two ways for a real estate agent to net more income: increase their revenue by closing more sales, which is hard to do in a down market, or decrease their expenses. We believe we can help agents do both, and that a truly distinguishing characteristic about Fathom. For the vast majority of real estate agents, their largest expense is not their marketing.
Their largest expense is the splits they pay their brokerage, with many paying more than $30,000 per year. In real estate, there's an adage that suggests splits only matter in the absolute value. I said that earlier. However, again, what if all things are equal? With Fathom, the agent can get all the technology, training, resources, support they're used to getting at one of the legacy brands and yet save an average of $12,000 or more per year in commission splits paid to the brokerage. In essence, an agent could potentially close 20% fewer homes and yet earn more income than they did the year before. With the potential market shift looming, Fathom is highly attractive to increasing number of agents. Fathom could also see greater market share per agent over time as our agents increase their total income on each sale.
With more income per sale, Fathom agents have more money available to invest in marketing and growing their businesses. When agents with legacy brands are struggling to earn a real living due to the fewer sales and lower income, that may create a need to pull back on a marketing spend in order to pay their bills. Fathom agents could potentially invest more in marketing than their peers, helping increase their market share and ultimately our market share as they sell more houses. In fact, we're already seeing some of that interest shows through our career site. We actively track our unique visitors, and it showed that our career site experienced an 85% increase in visitors in Q1 as compared to the same quarter in 2021. We believe that it's a strong indicator of future growth.
We believe that Fathom's ability to attract an ever-increasing number of real estate agents by providing them with greater income potential, along with the technology training and support they need to grow their businesses, is even more evident today, especially during these changing times. Fathom Realty recently grew its geographic reach with the addition of Montana and New Hampshire in Q1. We also expanded our Utah presence through the acquisition of iPro Realty's 400 plus agents. Now we plan to open several more markets throughout 2022. One more thing I should point out is the announcement we made in December about raising our fees for Fathom agents, which took effect in Q1, starting in January.
The annual fee for agents was raised 20% from $500 to $600 per year, and the transaction fees were raised 11% from $450 to $500 for the first 12 completed transactions. We're happy to report that these increases continue to have no impact on our agent retention or growth rate, most likely because our agents are still saving an average of around $12,000 or more as compared with traditional split brands. I want to talk next about intelliAgent and the advantage that our platform creates. The obvious advantage being that it allows Fathom to reduce costs per agent over time while measurably improving operational efficiencies. Our proprietary technology platform allows us to significantly reduce our reliance on third-party tech providers.
In fact, as of March, we're officially using all Fathom-built technology for our realty operation, which includes agent and brokerage websites, CRM, transaction management, personnel management, and more. Outside of financial reporting systems and social media products, there really isn't anything else that we're using outside of intelliAgent for our realty business. intelliAgent gives us the power to control the full life cycle of the home buyer and home seller, gaining a greater understanding of our data and how to use it to further improve our offerings while ultimately generating leads for our agents. Plus, we can now identify potential clients for our mortgage, insurance, and title companies long before they're under contract, as they raise their hands requesting more information.
Now, throughout 2021, we made significant investments in our mortgage, title, and insurance operations, and we continue to see very positive return on that investment in the form of improved attach rate and market share. In Q1, we acquired Cornerstone First Financial in Washington, DC. Cornerstone brought a very unique marketing approach to Encompass Lending, which we plan to roll out across the country in each of our markets where Encompass has a foothold. As you know, our mortgage, title, and insurance operations were all added through strategic acquisitions, and we're working diligently to integrate each business fully to ensure stronger attach rates. We also made several strategic real estate brokerage acquisitions in a very short period of time.
We expect that any future acquisitions we continue to consider will primarily be focused around opening new real estate markets or expanding our footprint in smaller current markets to hit critical mass faster. Each acquisition we pursue is expected to be immediately accretive to our business as we continue our path to profitability. While acquisitions are not our primary growth strategy, we will use acquisitions strategically as opportunities arise. We've been actively looking to brokerages across the country, and we'll share more of these opportunities as more of these opportunities turn into acquisitions and takeovers. Now in March, we initiated a $10 million share repurchase plan. The plan was designed to qualify for the safe harbor under SEC Rule 10b-18.
Certain purchases under the plan were also designed to allow us to make repurchases during otherwise closed trading windows under our insider trading policy in compliance with the SEC Rule 10b5-1. As many of you know, Rule 10b-18 limits our purchases to a percentage of average daily trading volume. As of the end of April, 310,000 shares in the amount of about $2.9 million were repurchased through the plan. Right now, it's hard to think that there is any asset available for us to buy that is greater value to Fathom and our shareholders than our own stock. We remain committed to our buyback, and we'll be thoughtful in how we move forward. Final points, and then I'll turn it over to Marco.
Over the last four quarters, our real estate business, Fathom Realty, generated just a bit of positive results, I mentioned that earlier, which we believe demonstrates that we're on the right path. We have strategically built an end-to-end integrated real estate brokerage service company offering real estate brokerage, mortgage, title, insurance, and SaaS services. We continue to enhance our underlying proprietary technology in addition to expanding our SaaS offerings. Throughout the rest of 2022, we'll continue to focus on strengthening our infrastructure and business integration as we seek to expand our footprint of our family of brands. Both organically and via acquisitions. Our focus has been and will continue to be to execute our long-term vision, of being among the top real estate brands in the country.
On our last call, we shared that assuming we reach between 100,000- 110,000 transactions per year, we believe that we can generate adjusted EBITDA exceeding $40 million. While we're not prepared to provide a timeline yet for that transaction milestone, we are confident we can maintain the strong agent and transaction growth that we've achieved consistently for more than a decade. Now, as I hope you can tell, we believe Fathom has a great future. We are proud of what we've been able to achieve and remain incredibly excited about the years ahead. With that, I'll turn the call over to Marco. Marco, it's all yours.
Thank you, Josh. Good afternoon, everyone. I'll start with a detailed review of our first quarter results, and we'll finish with our updated guidance for this year. First quarter revenues grew 81.4% year-over-year to $90.1 million, compared with $49.6 million for last year's first quarter. The increase resulted from growth in real estate transactions, increase in average revenue for real estate transaction, and revenue contributions from our newly acquired businesses. GAAP net loss for the quarter was $6 million or a loss of $0.37 per share, compared with a loss of $3.4 million or $0.25 per share for the 2021 first quarter.
The year-over-year change in GAAP net loss resulted principally from investments in future growth, operational and overhead costs related to acquired companies, incremental costs due to our transition to a public company, and increases in non-cash stock compensation and non-cash amortization of acquired intangible assets. Adjusted EBITDA loss, a non-GAAP measure, was $2.1 million versus adjusted EBITDA loss of $2 million for the first quarter of 2021. In the 2022 first quarter, G&A was $10.8 million or about 12% of revenue, compared with $6.1 million or 12.3% of revenue for the same period a year ago. The increase in G&A in absolute terms was primarily attributed to recently completed acquisitions and increases in non-cash stock compensation expense.
We anticipate that G&A expense will continue to increase on an absolute dollar basis going forward, driven by acquisitions and costs related to scaling and integrating our business lines. However, as it did this quarter compared to last year, G&A as a percentage of revenue is expected to decline over the long term as revenue increases. Expenses related to marketing activities were $1.1 million versus $402,000 for last year's first quarter, mostly driven by an increase in marketing activities related to new market openings and newly acquired companies. Next, I'll spend some time reviewing our business unit results. Our real estate division continues to perform very well. We finished the quarter with just over 9,000 agents, a 49% increase from the same period last year.
We closed just over 10,000 real estate transactions for the quarter, a 47% increase from last year's first quarter. Adjusted EBITDA in our real estate division was about $944,000, building on adjusted EBITDA profit that we've generated since Q2 of 2021. Gross profit per transaction was over $535 for the period. Our mortgage business generated revenues of $2.9 million in the 2022 first quarter, slightly higher than what we generated in Q4 of 2021. The adjusted EBITDA loss in the business approximately $490,000, likewise, slightly higher than Q4 of 2021. Moving to our technology segment, revenues in the 2022 first quarter totaled $644,000. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was a loss of $400,000.
Our insurance and title businesses have combined revenues of just over $2.5 million for the quarter, slightly higher than Q4 2021. Adjusted EBITDA for Verus Title, our title business, was $54,000, and adjusted EBITDA for Dagley Insurance was just over $100,000 for the quarter. Given that Q1 is generally the lowest revenue quarter for the year due to industry seasonality, our first quarter results were excellent, and we remain very excited for the future. We ended the quarter with a strong cash position of $30.5 million, which gives us plenty of runway to execute our strategy. Now let's discuss the attach rate. For both Encompass Lending and Verus Title, we rolled out several markets in the late summer of 2021. After nine short months, we continue to see attach rates that range from 5%-6%.
As we look at a continued increase in file starts from Fathom agents to both Verus and Encompass for Q1 of 2022, we believe that we'll exceed the 10% attach rate within eighteen months of Verus and Encompass opening any individual new market. As Josh indicated earlier, we implemented a share repurchase plan, and at the end of Q1 this year. As of the end of April, we repurchased 310,114 shares for a total amount of $2.9 million. Now, I'll finish with our guidance for the second quarter of 2022, as well as our updated guidance for the full year. We are updating this guidance based on the positive trends we continue to see in Fathom's business.
For the second quarter of 2022, Fathom expects total revenue to range between $110 million and $115 million, with adjusted EBITDA in the range of a loss of $200,000 to a positive adjusted EBITDA of $200,000. For the full year, we are increasing our revenue guidance to a range of $445 million-$455 million. Our adjusted EBITDA guidance range remains at a loss of $500,000 to a positive adjusted EBITDA of $500,000. Now as a reminder, guidance is forward-looking, which as Roger has noted in the beginning of the call, is subject to certain risks and uncertainties. Before I turn the call back to Josh, I'd like to say how proud I am of our entire team and what we have accomplished this past quarter.
Due to seasonality of this industry, the first quarter can be the most challenging quarter financially due to a usually lower number of transactions. However, we are outperforming every metric, including agent growth, transaction growth, and more importantly, we reduced our EBITDA loss significantly, which sets the foundation for reaching profitable adjusted EBITDA this year. I believe that our team's vision and passion will allow us to continue revolutionizing the residential real estate industry. Now, with that, I'll give the mic back to Josh, so we can take your questions.
Thank you, Marco. We believe that Fathom is a clear, visible, and long runway with tremendous growth prospects. No matter what the market holds, we believe that our model is positioned to win. We've been working hard to deliver on our promise to grow Fathom in an accelerated yet sustainable fashion for the long term. Thank you again for your trust and being part of our Fathom family. With that, operator, we're now ready to open the call to questions.
Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touch tone phone. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question will come from Darren Aftahi with Roth Capital Partners. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Had a nice quarter. A couple if I may. First, I'm just kind of curious. I know interest rates have been creeping up throughout the year. I'm just kinda curious what your general thoughts are, if you've seen any changes in your business in the second quarter to date. I've got two more follow-ups.
Yeah. Let me address the first part of that and have Marco address the second part. You know, a friend today sent me a chart showing that, you know, buyer sentiment is down. You know, how they feel about the market. You know, is today the right time to buy? It's pretty low right now. However, what's interesting is that buyer sentiment does not actually connect with that, what we're actually seeing on the street. As we talk to buyers in the street, as our agents are talking to buyers, you know, we're not really seeing a reduction in people raising their hands saying, "I wanna look for homes." I think when we ask them, "Why?
If you don't feel that great about the market, why are you still looking to buy a home?" Their reason is because, you know, that whole fear of loss, because prices keep going up, and if I wait, then the $400,000 home I'm looking for is now gonna be $420 or $430. You know, so yes, I don't love these interest rates, but, you know, I also don't love the idea of buying the same home for $430 now. So it's interesting that, you know, to see how, you know, the sentiment can be disconnected from what's actually happening in real life. Marco, do you wanna address the second part about how we're actually seeing an effect of Q2?
Sure. Yeah. Thank you. Darren, thank you for your question. We track file starts almost on a daily basis, and up to April of this year, we have not seen a reduction in file starts. Now, that does not mean that, you know, in May, that would change. From January all the way to end of April, we have not seen. We are still consistently having the same increase in file starts that we actually had last year and Q1 of last year as well. That does not mean that it may change, you know, by the end of May, but thus far we have not seen a decrease in that.
That's helpful. Thanks. Two more. So, you raised revenue for the full year by, I think, $20 million, if my math is right, but you kept your adjusted EBITDA range the same. Maybe just a commentary around that context and just, any kind of puts and takes on costs.
Yeah. The reason for that is that we are seeing some compression in margins in the mortgage business, and we don't know if those are going to continue to accelerate or they're gonna stay consistent. We did increase our revenue guidance for the year, but we want to be cautious, given that we're beginning to see some compression in the mortgage business. The mortgage business is still, you know, a very small part of our business, right? But we want to kind of hedge that and make sure that we are conservative in our adjusted EBITDA guidance. We're very keen in making sure we make our numbers when we say we're going to make them. That. That's the reason for that.
Great. Just last one from me. Can you just talk about where you guys stand on lead generation and kinda how do you decide which markets to roll that out to, and how fast you think you can get kind of greater scales in your markets and kinda what impact that's having on other areas of your business, like attach rates? Thanks.
Marco, let me address kind of part of it. I want you to address, you know, how we look at markets and how fast we're rolling out markets. One of the things that we're being very careful about is that while lead generation has a great return on investment long term, the initial upfront cost can be great. You know, we wanna always be good stewards. Right now, we are pushing for profitability, and so we're trying to balance the two. How fast do we spend the dollars to generate the leads? Knowing that the dollar I spend today may convert, that lead may convert, you know, nine months from now or 12 months from now. We want to be very careful about how we do that.
You know, we're trying to be very thoughtful about how quickly we roll it out. You know, if this was a different era, we'd probably be, you know, rolling it out much faster. Right now we're taking the time to really prove it out. We've got a great team that works with the leads that come in. They nurture those leads, then they assign those leads to agents. We're spending a lot more time training the agents, working through scripts. You know, what works the best to get the highest conversion ratio. In other words, for every dollar we do spend, even though it may take nine months or more to actually convert to a closing, we want to make sure we convert a higher percentage of those leads into closings.
We're very thoughtful about how we do that. As far as markets, I'll let you address that, Marco.
Sure. We generally, our leads program is comprised of three different ways to generate leads. One is through just regular pay-per-click and ads. Second is using our LiveBy, and third is our Hispanic division. We generate leads in three different ways. We are currently in five to six markets across the country. Markets like Las Vegas, Southern California, Houston, Atlanta, Charlotte, and I believe Chicago now. Those are the markets that we're in. As we continue to prove the financial results of the pilot, then we'll go ahead and look into other markets. We did increase from three to six.
You know, thus far continues to go well, but as Josh indicated, there is a significant investment into lead generation that typically takes six-nine months to prove itself. Right now we're currently with six markets. We think we'll probably continue the six markets for the rest of the year, prove our model, and then probably increase that either later in the year or early next year.
Thanks, guys.
Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. Our next question will come from Tom White with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.
Good evening, guys. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe just a follow-up on the topic of rising rates and sentiment. It sounds like the transaction pipeline looks fine. I was curious whether you're seeing or whether you anticipate, you know, sort of any change in kind of the M&A pipeline and how you're thinking about that over the next few quarters. I had a follow-up or two.
Sure. No, that's fantastic question. From an M&A standpoint, you know, we're thinking about brokerages. Really the focus of our M&A is on real estate brokerages. There's two ways of doing it. One is through acquisition, and the other is through a walkover. For those of you who don't know what a walkover is, a walkover would be a group of, let's say, 50 agents or 90 agents that instead of acquiring their company and going through all the, you know, the auditing of their books and make sure all that, we basically, you know, acquire the company or acquire the group by moving them over, moving all the licensing over to Fathom. It makes it easier. It's faster.
Instead of taking, you know, four or five- six months to go through the whole process of the acquisition, sometimes we can get that done in 60 days or 90 days. So cuts the time in half, it's faster. Obviously it costs less because we don't have as many legal fees and auditing fees and all the other fun stuff that go into it. Those are nice. You know, we like to focus more on the walkovers. I think over time you'll still see acquisitions that we make. We're actively pursuing acquisitions. What's interesting, though, is usually the acquisitions pursue us, as do the walkovers. It's not as often that we're reaching out to people saying, "Hey, have you ever thought about selling?
We'd love to have you join our Fathom family." It's usually the other way around. It's, "Hey, you know, I see you guys in the market. I love what you're doing. You know, we're struggling over here. I'd love to be..." Actually, they never say that they're struggling, but we can see they're struggling when we look at their numbers. But yeah, "We'd love to be part of the Fathom family. We'd love to help you grow in this market. You know, what could this look like?" We tend to be approached. We're actually. When we went public, we started seeing a much higher percentage of people approaching us. As the market started softening, we saw even more.
I think more and more companies, especially small companies who are barely surviving, are going to potentially die in a down market, right? There's 86,000 brokers. I think the number is actually higher now. A lot of these brokerages, these mom and pops with 30, 40, 50 agents and so. They're struggling to pay the bills as it is. If there's a market downshift, you know, then there's no way to pay the bills, right? They're dipping into savings to survive. A lot of them would come to us as a potential walkover. You know, we need more leadership anyways. That person can come in and help maybe be a manager in the company. You know, managing agents. We bring the agents over.
It's a very attractive way to grow. We like a lot of that. We are still pursuing, as I said, acquisitions. I think that over time you'll continue to see more and more of these takeovers and acquisitions.
Great. Thanks for that. Maybe just one follow-up on the buyback. You know, I realize you guys just announced the program, I think in mid-March. But you know, the balance sheet is healthy, and I, you know, I realize you've got a bunch of different kind of growth investment opportunities in parts of the business. But just curious if, you know, what are your thoughts on maybe getting more aggressive on buying back stock here, given, you know, kind of what's happening with it?
Sure. As far as the aggressive, our hands were tied a little bit because of the qualified plan that we had. You know, under the SEC rule, we can only sell so much per day. In fact, we had no control over what was sold. What was sold per day. So we had no control over it. Just, it happened the way it happened. You know, can we get more aggressive? I don't, honestly, I don't know the answer to that. I think Marco might be able to speak to that a little better than I do. I know that when we created the plan, we said we wanted to be aggressive.
You know, honestly, I think if we look at what we're buying per day, we were doing just that as far as what we were allowed to do. The problem is we don't have as much activity in our stock, so we're not selling. I think our average is about 70-80 thousand shares per day. You're kind of limited there. But yes, if we have the ability, we'd love to be a little more aggressive on it, especially right now while the stock is still incredibly desirable, you know, where it is right now. We think it's an incredible opportunity. One of the things, kind of go back to your first question, is, you know, we've got a pretty healthy balance sheet and where do we best spend those dollars, right?
Is it better to buy back a share or is it better to buy another agent? Like how do we grow? I think we can, as the saying goes, chew gum and walk at the same time. I think we continue to be aggressive and buy back more stock, as well as making these acquisitions or walkovers. That's kind of what we're pursuing. There's probably not a day that goes by that Marco and I don't have a conversation, sometimes with some of the board members as well, about, you know, how do we, how do we best move forward in this avenue or that avenue or this lane or that lane. We're trying to be very thoughtful in making sure we're always doing the best for our shareholders.
Tom, I think one of the things that makes our position interesting is that, you know, given our guidance for Q2 to be adjusted EBITDA positive, and then if we reach our adjusted EBITDA positive for the year, it means that, you know, for Q2, Q3 and Q4 are all gonna be adjusted EBITDA positive, right? It puts us in a very strong position that we're not going to burn through cash anymore and give our strong balance sheet. We have a variety of the opportunities here to look at not only a cash buyback, continue to do that, but also to look at all the interesting opportunities in the market. As Josh mentioned earlier, you know, we're beginning to see more and more companies between 25- 100 agents, right?
I think that's going to be one of the things that are going to sort of change the slope of the curve for our growth curve going forward, is the number of these walkovers that we're going to see in the second half of this year and first half of next year. I think that's one of the things that. You know, the reason we raised capital at the end of last year is because to a certain extent we anticipated somewhat, there would be more companies that would be interested in doing this. I think when you put all that together, I think it puts us in a very strong position. We are, you know, estimating they're reaching adjusted EBITDA in Q2. We have a strong balance sheet.
You know, you put those things together, it give us the ability to go execute, continue to grow at a significant pace and still look at continue to buy stock. So, I know we feel very, very good about our position right now.
Great. Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. As there are no more questions, this concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Josh Harley for any closing remarks.
Thank you so much, Albert. I appreciate it. You know, thank you again for everyone that's been on the call today and of course for your continued support. We are extremely proud of all that we've accomplished, and we're continuing to work diligently toward achieving our objective of adding greater value to our company, for the benefit of all our stakeholders. With that, have a wonderful week and may the fourth be with you.
The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.