Real Agency
02 · For the owner

Restructuring, now you're in

How the model pays Flying Keys now you have joined, and the steps to restructure the business around it. What to keep, what to let go of, and the order to do it in.

The headline for an owner is this. Your fixed overhead comes down, your team stops being a payroll cost and starts being a set of small businesses inside yours, and you pick up income you never had access to before. The trade is that you give up some day-to-day control over people who are now genuinely self-employed. That is the shift to manage now, and for most owners who have made this move it is a good trade.

What's different now you're in

Your costs

No franchise fee off the top. No desk fees. You do not need the office lease unless you want it. The tools you were buying separately, from the CRM to the portal profiles, come inside the membership.

Your team

Fee earners, meaning anyone who values, appraises or lists, move from employed to self-employed. You save roughly 17.5% that you were paying in National Insurance and pension on top of their wages.

Your income

Alongside your own sales, you earn from the split with your team, from revenue share, and from stock. The business becomes something you own a piece of, not just something you run.

The commission and the cap

This is the spine of the model, so it is worth getting clear.

On every deal you keep 70% and eXp takes 30%. That 30% is not endless. Once eXp has taken £24,000 from you in a year, you are "capped", and from then until your anniversary you keep 100%, less a small fee per transaction. As the owner, or "Progressing Team Leader" in eXp's words, you carry the full cap. Your team members carry half of it.

70/30
Your split with eXp until you cap
£24,000
Annual cap for the owner, then 100%
£12,000
Half cap for each team member
£250+VAT
Fee per deal after capping, dropping to £100 once you have paid £10,000 in these fees

For a live breakdown of how the split and eXp's cut stack up, per deal and across a year with the caps, see How splits work.

The monthly costs, honestly laid out

  • £125 + VAT one-off start-up fee per agent.
  • £75 + VAT a month technology fee.
  • £25 + VAT a month for the eXp university and training.
  • £25 + VAT a month towards online property advertising.
  • £50 + VAT a month to add lettings, which matters for Flying Keys given the letting and management side.
  • £800 + VAT a month "Progressing Team Leader" fee, per branch. This is the one that looks big, and it is designed to fall away.
  • £50 + VAT a month for each non-fee-earning user who needs the CRM, meaning admin or negotiators. Your fee earners are covered inside the membership.
The £800 is a training-wheels fee, not a forever fee. It drops to £400 + VAT once your rolling three-month gross commission passes a set level, and to £0 once you are past a higher level, both scaled by the number of branches you run. It also drops to £0 if you have eight team members each paying their own monthly fee. In other words, as the business performs, the fee disappears.
[to confirm] This guide assumes Flying Keys runs as a single branch from 107 High Street, Blackwood. If there is more than one branch, the per-branch fees and the ongoing production thresholds below multiply accordingly. Please confirm branch count.

Keeping your Team status

The entry requirements are behind you, that part is done. What matters now is the ongoing production that keeps your Team status in place. eXp looks at a rolling twelve months, and the figure they look for is 65 transactions at £225,000 gross commission, or £20 million of property sold. Treat it as a target to run at, not a hurdle you have to clear before you start.

[to confirm] Worth mapping your current rolling twelve-month production against that ongoing threshold early, so you know where you stand and can plan the year around it.

Revenue share: the part that becomes a pension

Revenue share is now one of the ways you earn, and it is the piece that is hardest to believe until you see it working. When you introduce an agent to eXp and they name you as their sponsor, you earn a share of the revenue from everything they sell, for as long as you are both active. It does not come out of their pocket. Of every fee an agent generates, 70% is theirs, 20% is eXp's and 10% is held as a reserve for the costs of operating internationally, and your revenue share is paid out of eXp's side, never the agent's.

For an agent you sponsor who caps in a year, that is a guaranteed £1,400 to you across that year, on your first tier. It runs seven tiers deep, because the agents you bring in are rewarded for bringing others in, and you earn from those too. Across eXp the yearly amount per capping agent runs from £1,400 on the first tier and £1,600 on the second, through the middle tiers and up to £2,000 on the seventh, and the pool is topped up so that around 10% of gross commission across the company flows back to the agents who help it grow. Built patiently over a few years, this is income that keeps arriving whether or not you personally list a house that month, and it is an asset you can pass on.

[from the eXp deck] The tier amounts and the 70/20/10 split are eXp-wide figures stated in the eXp UK partnership deck the operator supplied, not Flying Keys numbers. Worth a currency check with the eXp UK team before quoting the exact amounts.
£1,400
Per capping agent, per year, on your first tier
7 tiers
Deep, as your network brings in theirs
£0
Cost to the agent. It is paid from eXp's share

Stock: owning the company you sell for

You earn shares in eXp as you go. Across eXp the awards are £160 of stock when your first sale completes, £320 when you cap, and another £320 for each agent you attract once they have made their first sale, all vesting over three years. On top of that you can choose to take 5% of your own commission as shares at a 10% discount rather than cash, which is how a little over half of eXp agents build the shareholding faster.

The ICON award is worth up to £16,000 in stock for top producers. Across eXp you reach it by capping and then completing another 40 transactions in your anniversary year, or by doing £400,000 of gross commission across at least 10 transactions in a twelve-month window. Half is awarded in stock, and the other half follows once you take part in eXp's training and in-person events.

[from the eXp deck] The award amounts, the 10% purchase discount and the £16,000 ICON figure are eXp-wide figures stated in the eXp UK partnership deck the operator supplied, not Flying Keys numbers. This settles the discount we had left open, since earlier sources disagreed, and it is worth a quick currency check with the eXp UK team before you lean on the exact amounts.

The 95/5 system: growth without becoming a recruiter

The natural worry is that revenue share means turning into a salesperson for eXp instead of selling houses. It does not. The system built around this is called 95/5, and the idea is in the name. You spend 95% of your time on the core business, listing and selling. You spend 5% on introducing agents, and even that you do not do alone.

The model splits the job in two. You are the "connector". You know agents, you meet them, you see their boards. When one seems like they would benefit, you connect them to a "presenter", usually your sponsor, who runs the detailed conversation and the numbers. You never have to become the expert who sells the opportunity. You just have to notice who might want it and make the introduction.

"You cannot say the right thing to the wrong person, and you cannot say the wrong thing to the right person." The 95/5 rule of thumb. It is about noticing and connecting, not pushing.

How you run it from here

You have come across as a Team, which is the standard route for an existing agency. You are still the owner and Team Leader, your fee earners come with you as self-employed team members, and Flying Keys carries on as Flying Keys, powered by eXp. From here, how far you take it is your call.

  • Keep it as a lifestyle business. Run it at the size that suits you, in your own patch, with no pressure to build a national operation.
  • Or build it out. Use revenue share and attraction to grow a network well beyond what a single branch could ever do, without taking on the cost and risk of opening offices.

The key difference from the traditional world is what happens when a good agent grows. In a normal agency they eventually leave and compete with you. Under eXp they can grow their own team and still sit inside your revenue share, so their success keeps rewarding you rather than taking from you.

Your transition checklist

Rough order of play now the ink is dry. Adam and the eXp UK team walk you through the detail.

  • Confirm your branch count and get your eXp, Loop and portal profiles set up in the Flying Keys brand.
  • Sort your team into fee earners and support staff, so you know exactly who is converting.
  • Decide the split you will offer each fee earner as a self-employed team member.
  • Get the workforce consultancy involved to handle the employed-to-self-employed conversion properly and legally. This matters, see the next section.
  • Run the data migration from your current CRM and get the website rebuild moving.
  • Have the team conversations early and honestly, before anything formal lands with them.
  • Set your go-live date. Onboarding for an existing agency is roughly four weeks.
  • Once you are live, start the 5% attraction habit and map your production against the ongoing target.
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