Glenn Sanford and eXp Realty’s virtual world (Credit: Facebook and eXp Realty)
EXp Realty, the cloud-based virtual reality office where brokers walk around and make deals with avatars, has doubled in size to 12,000 agents.
The news comes after the company entered the NASDAQ exchange in May, trading at an astounding $1 billion. The huge entry meant it was trading higher than national franchise brokerage Re/Max, which at that point had a market cap of $944 million.
Glenn Sanford, who founded the company in 2009, said the brokerage had experienced 85 percent growth since the start of 2018, according to Inman.
In the 3-D virtual world, agents are represented by avatars and earn stock in the company when they close deals or recruit new agents.
The firm recently expanded to three provinces in Canada, including British Columbia, and is active in 49 U.S. states.
Elsewhere in the virtual real estate space, plots in digital city Genesis City are trading for as much as $200,000. The creators of the larger virtual world, called Decentraland, raised $26 million in under a minute last year. The virtual world uses the Ethereum blockchain platform. [Inman] — David Jeans