Wendy Forsythe has spent decades in real estate leadership roles, building a reputation as an industry veteran and a visible voice in the brokerage world.
Now, after serving two years as chief marketing officer of eXp Realty and helping lead a brand transformation, Forsythe has been promoted to chief operating officer of the cloud-based brokerage. She is also one of the real estate leaders tapped to join Inman’s new advisory council.
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Forsythe spoke with Inman about her new role, eXp’s evolving operations, the role of AI in brokerage support and what she hopes to see from Inman’s next chapter.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: You were recently promoted from CMO to COO at eXp Realty. What were some of the initiatives from your time leading marketing that you were most proud of?
Forsythe: Since I’ve joined eXp, we completely took the brand through what we called a brand glow-up. The look and feel and how the eXp brand shows up in the marketplace, we modernized in every way — from the colors, logo, design and aesthetic to the messaging of the brand and how we talk about the brand.
That has been really important because we needed the energy of the brand to match the energy of the stakeholders in the brand. When you think of our agents, who are high-performing professional entrepreneurs out there in the marketplace, those two things need to align. To bring the brand and our agents’ energy into alignment has been something I’ve been hugely proud of.
We’ve also brought some great products in terms of increasing our value proposition to the agent. Canva is one. We were the first to introduce Canva at an enterprise level to the platform and add that to our value stack for our agents. That was a huge initiative.
I’ll never forget when we rolled Canva out to the agents. We did it at our big event, eXpcon, and that was like an Oprah moment on stage, saying, “You’re all going to get Canva at no additional cost.” Almost 6,000 people in that audience went crazy because they were already Canva users.
eXp Realty has roughly 83,000 agents, and it is also now integrating NextHome. What are some of your goals in the COO role, and what does “agent-obsessed operations” look like at that scale?
If we talk just from the eXp Realty perspective, which is where I am hyper-focused, we have always been the most agent-centric brokerage on the planet. That is our North Star.
We are at such an inflection point right now with AI and the opportunity that it gives us to really be AI-forward in how we operate a brokerage business. We closed 343,000 transactions last year as a brokerage. You can imagine the volume of work that is for an operations team to get every single agent involved in every one of those transactions paid every single day. We do that in a matter of minutes, and that is our commitment.
To be AI-forward yet people-centric is at the core of our operations commitment. For me, stepping into the role of COO is to help bring that vision to the next level, because we have this inflection point of reimagining what that looks like using AI in brokerage operations. It has given us a whole new world to think about what best practices look like, because tomorrow and today are not what yesterday was in our business.
The nature of competition in brokerage has changed so much. It is not just tech stack or agent tools anymore. There are also questions around transparency, control over listings, consumer interests and broader industry principles. What is your industry thesis right now?
My ethos is that we are at a pivotal moment in the industry, and all of us in leadership need to anchor on transparency and what is right for the consumer. If we anchor our decisions on that, we’ll navigate through the various decisions that need to be made in the right way to get to the right place.
We are all running businesses. We are all responsible to our shareholders. We are responsible to the stakeholders in our businesses, and we should be competitive. We need to be competitive. That’s what business is. But you can be competitive and still anchor on doing the right thing for the consumer. That is how we compete every single day, and that is how we want our agents to show up and compete every single day.
We will continue to do that in a very compelling way and in a way that will continue to see eXp grow in market share, grow in agent count and grow in all of the KPIs that are important for our business to grow in.
Shortly after the NAR settlement, eXp introduced forms and made them available for others in the industry to use. From an operations perspective, do you expect eXp to continue down that same path around forms, plain language and open-sourcing resources when it makes sense?
If it anchors in, “It’s the right thing to do for the consumers, it’s the right thing to do for the business,” we’ll always anchor in that first as we make our business decisions. We’ll make the right decisions around that for the business, and then we’ll compete to go out there and compete for business from there.
Holly [Mabery] is at the legislative meetings with NAR this week representing us. We have such a strong leadership team. When we talk about the overall value proposition of a business, the leadership element of that is one of the things that you can’t copy and paste. It is one of the things that I am most proud of as being part of the leadership team here at eXp. Leo [Pareja] and Holly and myself and Carrie Lysenko and Seth Siegler and, obviously, Glenn Sanford — we are just a team of practitioners who are out there every day living and breathing this industry.
I think our customers, our agents, respect that. I was on a call with an agent today, and he told me they respect that we have sold real estate, that we have dealt with forms, that we have been on committees, that we’ve walked the walk.
Pivoting to the Inman Advisory Council — how did that come together, and why did you decide to join?
Inman is in a new chapter with Tom [Bohn] stepping in as the new CEO. I was excited to welcome Tom into the role. I have been part of the Inman community for literally decades. Inman has been an important part of my career. I value the community so much. I value the place the community has in the industry.
When Tom’s announcement was made, I reached out to him right away to welcome him and introduce myself to him. That led to a conversation where he shared some of his thoughts and his goals. Being himself an outsider to the industry, one of the things he shared was that he wanted to put together this group of industry people that he could use as a sounding board and rely on to give him input, and to give the Inman leadership input, as they were imagining and crafting this next chapter for Inman.
He wanted people who were outspoken enough to give real opinions, because that is what we need as leaders. We need real feedback to help guide and craft decisions that we make. I was honored when he asked if I would participate, and I’m excited to be part of it and see this evolution of what the next chapter of Inman becomes.
The first advisory council meeting will be at Inman Connect San Diego. What are some ideas you would like to present? What would you like to see Inman cover more, or what conversations should the industry be having right now?
There is always a perspective about diversity in voices and getting as many different voices as possible as part of the conversation. I think there is an opportunity for that. Of course, you have to balance bringing the news to the industry, and the news is often made by a select few of those voices. But there are a lot of amazing stories out there that I think could balance that out.
In what we run, we are running stories all the time about our agents, so we try to find that same balance. I think that would be one of the things I would encourage: diversity in storytelling, not just from the headlines of industry news, but a different type of storytelling about what is happening in this industry from the ground level and the field level.
It does feel like we often hear from industry leaders and corporate voices, but at the end of the day agents are licensed professionals, independent contractors and the people carrying risk in the field. Is there anything else you would want to add about the industry, your new role or what agents need right now?
It is a time of change in the industry, and for agents, working in a stable environment has never been more important. In my new role and here at eXp, that is one of the things that we work toward every single day: providing that stability for them.
They know they can count on their brokers to be there to answer questions for them when they need us. They can count on getting paid quickly when those commission checks come. They can count on us to be there working for them on these important issues that are happening out in the industry.
That is more important than ever before. That is what I’m excited about: I get to represent all of our agents every single day.
