Many brokerages are racing to ship their own branded artificial intelligence assistants. eXp Realty, the core operating subsidiary of AGNT, Inc., is deploying a multi-pronged AI strategy.
The brokerage unveiled “MCP First, AI of Choice” on Thursday at eXpcon in Salt Lake City. The initiative lets agents connect Claude, ChatGPT or whatever AI tool they already use directly to their eXp business data.
It led a four-announcement slate that also included a mortgage joint venture with Newrez, a pay-at-close home prep program offering up to $50,000 and a new marketplace for agent-to-agent showing coverage.
How eXp’s MCP approach works
The AI play runs on Model Context Protocol, the open standard Anthropic introduced in late 2024 that lets AI assistants pull from outside tools and data.
Instead of building an AI tool, eXp is publishing MCP connections to its own systems: the Hub, My eXp (production and compensation data), eXp University and eXp Divisions. It is also connecting Canva and CRMs including Lofty, BoldTrail and Cloze. Follow Up Boss and Sisu are listed as coming soon.
Leo Pareja
Once an agent authorizes the connection, they can ask their AI about production numbers, leads, transactions or training progress without leaving the chat window.
The approach sets eXp apart from other brokerages betting heavily on proprietary, closed ecosystems. The most prominent example is Compass’s Home Platform rollout across the former Anywhere brands. The Home Platform rollout began with Compass International Holdings’ company-owned brands this year and will extend to franchisees early next year.
“Every company in this industry is racing to build the best AI assistant,” said Leo Pareja, CEO of eXp Realty, in a statement. “We asked a different question: Why should agents have to change how they work at all? ‘MCP first, AI of Choice ’ means agents keep using the AI they already trust. We’re making sure it can hear from eXp.”
Pareja framed MCP as the first visible piece of a larger rebuild called AGNT OS. It modernizes the systems that manage how agents close deals and get paid. It’s built on what the company calls the Nexus platform, developed by eXp International, and is targeted for early 2027.
“MCP is the front door, and AGNT OS is the whole house,” Pareja said. “This isn’t a patch on our existing systems — it’s a full modernization of how eXp runs, built agent-first from the ground up. MCP is how we prove that vision starts now.”
Why eXp thinks its MCP strategy is a ‘massive advantage’
Pareja said deciding on “MCP First, AI of Choice” was “a very thoughtful process as we watched what’s happening in the marketplace.”
“We think it’s directionally accurate, and adjusting human behavior is the hardest thing on the planet,” Pareja told Inman on Wednesday morning before eXpcon began. “Every person, independent of real estate, is already living in their favorite AI.”
Pareja added that the other “massive advantage” of the MCP strategy is that eXp doesn’t have to build a 2.0, a 3.0, and keep releasing AI updates to a brokerage platform.
“For the past 18 months, we’ve been in a three-to-four-month update loop on frontier AI models,” Pareja said. “We’ve gone from Claude Sonnet to Fable to OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, and they go back and forth. Every time the frontier labs drop a new model, the experience our agents have with our data gets faster, stronger and better, at a pace we could never compete with.”
By now, Pareja said, it’s a foregone conclusion that all real estate agents use AI in some shape or form. He couldn’t provide hard data on how many eXp agents use AI, but he has plenty of anecdotal evidence.
At a recent event, he asked a room of 300 eXp agents to raise their hands if they use AI every day, and 100 percent of them did. “Then we surveyed ChatGPT versus Claude, and it was almost 50/50,” Pareja told Inman. “And in both cases, something like 80 to 90 percent of the room had a premium account, which lets you use all the connectors.”
Pareja said eXp also meets with its top producers every 90 days, and they have seen the evolution of AI adoption among agents over the last 24 months.
“We went from showing them, ‘This is a large language model; this is how you use it to create a single-property website or a flyer,’ to now, where they’re completely fluent,” he said. “If you even bring up the idea that they should be using AI, they look at you funny.”
From ‘Frankenstein’ to Nexus
eXp is still building AI platforms in some capacity, though. “eXp is connecting agents to their preferred AI tools while also developing its own brokerage technology,” an eXp spokesperson told Inman on Wednesday night.
While the brokerage is leaning on the MCP strategy, it is also developing AGNT OS and its Nexus platform, which was announced in August.
eXp International says Nexus, the AI-built operating platform, which started as a vibe-coding experiment, can cut a market’s software costs by up to 70 percent. The company eventually plans to sell it to competing brokerages.
Nexus puts CRM, transaction management, listing management, e-signature, marketing, and agent recruitment behind a single login. It runs on one shared codebase that adapts to each country’s currency, regulations and transaction structure.
That matters for a division that operates in 26 countries outside the U.S. and Canada, where agents typically juggle five or more disconnected systems, according to the company.
Felix Bravo
Nexus traces back to an event about a year ago in Montreal, where eXp founder Glenn Sanford challenged executives to vibe-code their ideal system for an agent.
“What I built looked like Frankenstein and didn’t work at all. But it was the origin story of Nexus,” said Felix Bravo, managing director of eXp International.
Bravo added that the company plans to keep building on Nexus indefinitely, ensuring what he described as an internal philosophy of never treating a platform as finished.
The company says that Nexus is a project of eXp International, the portion of AGNT, Inc.’s business that operates outside the United States and Canada, spanning 26 countries.
The platform is now in beta following an alpha phase in Latin America, and agents access it through eXp’s existing Hub. eXp is rolling it out in three phases: pilot markets first, then multi-country adoption, then a tiered subscription model opening Nexus to non-eXp agents and brokerages. The company hasn’t disclosed pricing or a timeline for that final phase.
eXp attributes the cost savings to replacing per-country CRM subscriptions and separate tool licenses with a single platform cost, but didn’t say which markets saw the 70 percent figure or what they were paying before.
The company is also opening Nexus’s APIs to its agents, letting those building their own AI tools on third-party platforms pull in their Nexus data.
