In the latest example of eXp Realty scooping up a top-performing team, the Minnesota-based Tyler Miller Team has jumped to the fast-growing virtual brokerage after leaving local powerhouse Edina Realty.
The Tyler Miller Team officially moved from Edina to eXp in September. The team includes seven people including leader Tyler Miller as well as three other agents and three administrative staff. In a conversation with Inman, Miller described Edina as a local powerhouse with the largest agent count and market share in the region. He said his team was the second highest performing at the company in 2020, and was on track to be Edina’s top team this year before jumping to eXp.
Miller spoke positively about Edina, saying his father also works at the company and that he loved his time there. However, Miller was ultimately drawn to the “vision of pure and honest partnership and collaboration” at eXp. He added that such a culture “doesn’t exist in real estate except” at the upstart virtual brokerage.
Tyler Miller
“It was an incredibly tough, emotional decision to leave that company,” Miller said of Edina.
Miller’s journey to eXp began several years ago. At the time, he was raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions. But one day he visited a Keller Williams office and saw that they had an award on the wall for people earning $1 million.
“I stopped and I was like, ‘Wait a minute, people can make that much money in real estate?'” he recalled. “It was a complete freeing of the mind in that moment.”
Over the ensuing years Miller began connecting with other agents, including a group who had made the jump to eXp. That process finally came to a head this spring, when he went on a business retreat to Mexico with a group of mostly eXp team leaders. He described the environment on the trip as “absolute pure collaboration.”
“Literally every time that someone talked my mind exploded,” Miller said. “After that trip, I couldn’t unsee eXp.”
In making the jump to eXp, Miller and his team represent the latest chapter in one of real estate’s most significant sagas of the moment: The battle for top teams. The competition for teams has involved major moves from a variety of companies, but Compass and eXp have been particularly successful. In eXp’s case, some of the more prominent examples include a Keller Williams team in Utah that defected in April, an Arizona indie that joined in February, and a RE/MAX team in Toronto that made the move last fall.
The reasons for these moves vary. However, commonly cited reasons include eXp’s compensation model that includes stock and incentives for recruiting, as well as the prospect of expanding a team without having to go through the hassle of opening a brokerage or buying a franchise.
Significantly, many of the teams making the jump to eXp are among the top-performers in their respective markets.
In Miller’s case, he said his team sold 193 units in 2020 and is on pace to do 210 sides this year. However, he also said that money wasn’t what ultimately drove him to switch to eXp. Instead, he was willing to make the hard decision to leave the company where he started his real estate career because he ultimately wanted to “be around like-minded individuals.”
“Everything I’m going through,” Miller said, referring to the challenges of leaving Edina, “wouldn’t be worth it to me if I didn’t feel strongly about eXp.”
