MW This CEO is leading an army of real estate agents through the most complex housing market in decades
By Aarthi Swaminathan
Leo Pareja, CEO of eXp Realty, talks to MarketWatch about how industry changes and a persistent affordability crisis are affecting home buyers and sellers alike
Leo Pareja, the CEO of eXp Realty, lands on the MarketWatch 25 list of the people reshaping how we live, work, spend, save and invest.
Leo Pareja has spent more than 20 years observing the wild swings of a boom-and-bust U.S. housing market. Now, Pareja, the chief executive of eXp Realty (EXPI), one of the largest real-estate brokerages in North America, heads an army of agents whose clients are navigating one of the most complicated periods in decades for both buyers and sellers.
Luckily, Pareja, who got his real-estate license when he was 19, has some experience contending with tricky markets. He lands on the MarketWatch 25 list of the people reshaping how we live, work, spend, save and invest.
When Pareja bought his first home in Washington, D.C., before he turned 21, the real-estate market was booming. The early 2000s brought a surge of home-buying activity, fueled by cheap and easy credit. The result was a housing bubble.
Pareja then saw the housing market screech to a halt during the Great Recession, a crisis in which subprime mortgages were a central cause. Then the market recovered, and the coronavirus pandemic ushered in yet another frenzy among home buyers - once again turbocharged by cheap credit.
Today, the housing market is once again facing a challenging plight, albeit one of a different nature. This time around the market is in a deep freeze - the market hasn't gone bust, but it's not moving. High home prices and interest rates and concerns about the economy are part of what's fueling the stalemate. But Pareja offers a more nuanced explanation for the stagnation: a tense standoff between home buyers and sellers.
The two camps have wildly different expectations. Home buyers are finding homeownership too expensive, yet sellers refuse to accept a new environment in which they are no longer calling the shots.
"Some sellers think it's 2021, and some buyers think it's 2008," Pareja said in an interview with MarketWatch. "But the reality is it's neither."
'Some sellers think it's 2021, and some buyers think it's 2008. But the reality is it's neither.'Leo Pareja, eXp Realty
The challenging environment for buyers and sellers has a complicated backdrop. Real-estate companies are locked in a fierce battle for market share, slinging lawsuits at their rivals even as many of them are pouring billions of dollars into acquiring competitors. This in an industry that's still adjusting to a landmark lawsuit and settlement that's changed the way agents do business by encouraging buyers and sellers to negotiate, or even shop for, a lower commission rate or a better commission structure.
Pareja, 43, leads eXp Realty, which counts more than 82,000 real-estate agents under its umbrella and is a unit of the publicly-traded eXp World Holdings. From his perch, he's been outspoken about some of the ways these changes to the real estate industry could help - or harm - consumers. He's also tried to position his agents as some of the sector's most transparent and consumer-friendly.
Home sales still stuck at a 30-year low
A major challenge facing the housing market right now is that it's "hyperlocalized," Pareja said. Even though housing inventory is soaring in places like Florida, prompting home prices to fall sharply, other parts of the country are still seeing strong price growth amid tight inventory.
The national market, meanwhile, is on track to see the worst sales pace in 30 years, according to data from the National Association of Realtors. Housing affordability remains a key issue driving state and local elections, and President Donald Trump has repeatedly pressured Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to lower interest rates, blaming him for causing or exacerbating a housing crisis.
The sluggish pace is also due to how costly homes have grown. The median sales price of an existing U.S. home this September was $415,200, which was 50% higher than in September 2019.
Read more: Home sellers have a 'tough pill to swallow' this fall, real-estate agents warn
Home-buying demand remains relatively weak, as seen in recent pending-home-sales data from NAR. Even though mortgage rates were lower over the last few weeks and stock-market performance SPX DJIA remains robust, people were still largely holding off on buying a house, the data indicated.
Would-be sellers are also getting frustrated. In recent months, sellers have increasingly pulled listings off the market when they haven't received a good enough offer. In September, more than 47,000 home listings were removed from the market as the sellers decided to hold off, according to data from Realtor.com. That's up 52% from the same month a year earlier.
(Realtor.com is operated by News Corp subsidiary Move Inc.; MarketWatch publisher Dow Jones is also a subsidiary of News Corp.)
Even though interest rates are down, home buyers remain cautious, likely because of concerns about the job market and the economy more broadly. Falling home prices have not spurred sales activity in the southern states, either. About three-quarters of Americans surveyed recently by Fannie Mae (FNMA) believe it's a bad time to buy a house.
Pareja said he understands why some buyers may be skittish. There's the muddled state of the economy and, for many, job threats posed by the coming boom in artificial intelligence and the Trump administration's aggressive posture toward federal workers.
Despite these challenges, Pareja is, perhaps unsurprisingly, still bullish on buying a home. He advises consumers to consider whether they plan to stay in the same area for at least 10 years. If they do, he suggests researching whether buying, for them, represents a good opportunity. Pareja notes that waiting even three years to buy could cost you, given that homes tend to appreciate in value.
Owning a home can be a major wealth generator in part because ownership creates "a forced savings account," Pareja said, calling it "a feature of our 30-year mortgage in this country."
Major real-estate-industry moves don't necessarily benefit the consumer
Those looking to buy or sell homes now face a drastically different environment from what they would have encountered even a few years ago. Thanks to a settlement with the National Association of Realtors last year there's more transparency surrounding how much people pay real-estate agents and they're more empowered to negotiate commissions.
To Pareja, that transparency is a good thing. Now buyers have a better understanding before they see a house about the service their agent will be providing and how much they'll pay for it, he said.
Partially in response to the settlement some brokerages have pushed to keep more listings in-house to ensure agents get paid. In recent months, another real-estate brokerage giant, Compass $(COMP)$, has advocated for the right of sellers to list their home however they choose, including privately and off-market, as opposed to being displayed straightaway on publicly accessible property-listing platforms. The company argues that it wants to allow sellers flexibility in how their homes are marketed and that the real-estate platforms should not profit from controlling access to information.
A Compass spokesperson said that the "reality is that every seller's situation is different" and that "some want maximum exposure immediately, while others want a more strategic, phased approach to marketing."
Read more: A real-estate giant wants sellers to list their homes privately. Will homeowners benefit?
Pareja doesn't buy the Compass argument.
Across his decades of experience, he said, he can count on one hand the number of times a seller wanted to list their home privately. One instance was when a federal judge who oversaw cases under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, didn't want the property address or personal information to appear on a public-facing website for safety reasons. Or when a landlord wanted to sell a property still occupied by a tenant and didn't want buyers to violate their privacy while the lease was still in effect.
Another key reason why pocket listings appeal to some sellers is that if a seller's home spends a long time on the market, the duration won't be visible to the public if it's privately marketed. The fact that a house spends a long time on the market has the potential to discourage some buyers, so not having time spent on the market visible publicly could prevent any bad impressions of the house.
And on the flip side, some buyers actively seek out pocket listings as a way to sidestep competition, since these homes are not marketed widely by the seller and hence invite less attention.
"By and large, what commerce has taught us across the world is that having the most eyeballs on any product is the best way to do it," Pareja said. "I just don't understand how anyone can argue that it is better [to restrict] exposure."
Related: Goodbye Zillow surfing? How megamergers in the real-estate industry could impact home buyers.
-Aarthi Swaminathan
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November 12, 2025 12:01 ET (17:01 GMT)
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