Good morning, and welcome to another motivational Monday. My name is Matthew Hodge, executive vice president here at LPT Realty. If you can hear me okay real quick, just give me a quick thumbs up in the chat. Fantastic. We got lots of thumbs up in the room. Yeah. We got yeah. They can hear us. Alright. Awesome. Okay. My name is Matthew Hodge, executive vice president. I'm joined by Robert Palmer, founder and CEO of LPT Realty. And today, we are in front of a live studio audience. We have, so many LPT agents across, the the many states represented here in studio, so excited to have them here. Yeah. Alright. Fantastic. Nice, nice work on the camera work, Dave. Yeah. So we're excited to be here today, man. It's, we are winding down to the end of the year. Two weeks left. Tons of things to still announce. We're excited for 2025. So I'll turn it over to you to kinda get your initial thoughts on, you know, how we end the year strong and and Yeah. No, man. It's it's been an absolutely amazing year. You look back on everything we've accomplished as a company, as a family here. It's really exciting. This is my last Monday in Florida. I'm gonna be heading out to Montana this weekend. I'll be out there for a couple of months, skiing with the little girl. Still working. Can't turn it off, but it's been a little time with my girls on the slopes and hanging out out there. But, yeah, it's just been an absolutely amazing, amazing year, you know. And, blessed to have this amazing group of people with us today, our studio audience. So, you know, we announced our testimonial video contest, and we had lots of amazing submissions. And, yeah, we got everybody out there in the audience. Right? And, so we decided to invite everyone who submitted a testimonial video to come down to corporate today. And I'd say probably about two thirds were able to make the trip in. We've got people from California and Michigan and all over the country and really excited to have this group. So we're gonna hang out today. We're gonna be shooting these videos where they're gonna talk about ways that LPT Realty has impacted their life, their business. They get to be here for this live motivation Monday. And then also, we're gonna do shareholder meeting this afternoon. So they're gonna be live in the conference room for shareholder meetings. So Yeah. Really exciting, really exciting stuff going on. One last meeting tonight, eight PM? Yeah. And then we've also got the fireside chat tonight at eight PM. So, you know, we announced this, on social media last week, but, the agents, and leadership of Big Block Realty have all joined LPT. They were the 38th largest independent brokerage in the country, and they're now here with us in the amazing state of California and getting us going here. Yep. We got some folks in the audience. And so, tonight, Sam, who is the CEO of Big Block, and I are gonna do a fireside chat to talk about that decision, you know, their decision. You know, basically, I I think according to Real Trends, they had, like, twelve hundred agents and we're the thirty eighth largest independent brokerage, and now they're here as a part of our family at LPT. And so we're gonna be talking about that at eight o'clock eastern time tonight so the California folks can tune in at five PM. So we got a packed day. I mean, eleven AM Zoom, twelve PM we or noon we got LPT plus, four o'clock shareholders, eight o'clock fireside chat. We are wall to wall Zooms all day long. We hope you guys will join us on all of it. The eight PM will be live streamed on LPT main stage. So people if you want to, you can register for the Zoom to be part of the chat, or people can just anonymously watch that one. So we're figuring we get a lot of folks in California who wanna be anonymous. So we're streaming that on, LPT main stage at eight o'clock tonight. Yep. But with that, we've got an exciting motivation Monday kicked off today. One thing I do wanna touch on interest rates. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and so rates rates crept back up. We had a really rough day in the market Thursday and Friday. And so, you know, we had announced that I think we were on, like, a four or five week low for rates, and we were starting to see activity. And then, of course, what have rates been doing to us for the last two and a half years? They're now back up to where they were the sixth week before that drop started. So just keep an eye on that. Make sure you continue to counsel your buyers. Work with those lender partners. Make sure your your clients understand what's going on. We just continue to see a whole lot of volatility around interest rates. And I think I think that's really gonna be the theme for next year. You know, as we go into 2025, I think interest rate volatility is going to continue to be the name of the game. So, we're just gonna keep we'll always keep you updated here. You can you can obviously judge based on my facial hair how things are going. And so the beard's a little longer because rates are going back up. And, we'll just we'll see where they one of these days, I'm gonna get this thing off, and it's gonna stay off, and we're gonna see rates go down. But until then, I'm gonna stick with the program. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it's funny because, you talk about the 2025 and the initiative around that and kinda thinking about, you know, how we are going to help our agents succeed in 2025. So we're coming off of this slowdown where it's probably the drastic slowdown from where we were to where we probably end this year, three and a half million annualized sales. And next year, are you anticipating that same volume? I mean and while I know we can't say anything like we've got no crystal ball, but what do you what does your gut kinda tell you in terms of inventory constraints for 2025? Yeah. I I really think this was the low watermark year. I think we're gonna see I think we're gonna see an improvement next year. Nothing dramatic. You know, we're not gonna get back to anywhere, you know, where we've been historically, but I think we're gonna see an improvement. There is this factor of where, you know, consumers and households can only put off the decision to buy or sell for so long. Like, as much as people wanna hang on to that super low interest rate forever, there is this reality. You know, like, life sets in. Like, hey. We're getting divorced, and we've tried to cohabitate for two years now because of this low rate, and then we're miserable. Or, hey. My kids are at a new school across town, or I took a new job on the other side of town, and I'm holding on to the house. I think there is a point where people just start to let go. And the other interesting thing is amortization. Right? So amortization mortgage term means to kill. Right? Amortization is killing the debt. And so, you know, if you took out a fifteen year mortgage back in twenty twenty two or back in twenty twenty, sorry, when rates first dropped, I mean, you're already four years about to be five years into that fifteen year mortgage. And so what's happening is you're really starting to chip away at the principal now. And, you know, we talked about this, probably about a year ago, but as the gap between your home's value and the amount you have locked in at that super low rate gets wider, you're more likely to do something. Right? So let's say, initially, you took out a a two hundred thousand dollar mortgage on a three hundred thousand dollar house, and that two hundred thousand was locked in at a super low rate. Like, that's good. You you don't have much of a gap there. Well, now fast forward five years, and all of a sudden, you've paid the mortgage down to say maybe a hundred and twenty thousand, a hundred and thirty thousand, and meanwhile, the house value has gone up to five hundred thousand. You now have, like, four hundred thousand dollars worth of equity that is not locked in at that low rate. And so the impact of that super low interest rate just becomes less and less and less. And so each year that goes by now, because home values continue to go up and mortgages balances are going down naturally from that amortization, that gap gets wider and and people have less of a reason to hang on. And so I just think when you take all those factors into play, people's need to do something. Right? Like, usually, it's life events driving purchases of homes and sales of homes. And right now, people are artificially holding back because they don't wanna lose that super low rate. They don't wanna go to the new higher rate. So even if we don't see rates drop, you're gonna have these other factors continue to play in, which I think will start to free up inventory. I think people are just getting more in tune to the idea that, hey, I've waited as long as I can. Or hey, this probably isn't gonna change dramatically. Like, these are the new rates. Like, we really got spoiled by the idea that we were locking in thirty year rates with two handles. I mean, that that probably never should've happened, honestly. I mean, it just didn't make a lot of sense. The Fed really overheated. They didn't need to drive rates that low to create the pandemic offset that they did. We could have done it with rates in the threes and fours, not twos and threes. So they overshot. All that's kinda working through the system now. If we see rates come down, that will absolutely change the game. But I believe even without rates dramatically coming down, just more consumers are moving into this this world of, "hey, I'm gonna do something because I have to". And that's really what we need as an industry. You know, we've we've been blessed that home prices have stayed stable. You know, new construction builders have tried to keep up. They have provided good inventory. We see a lot of new construction sales running through the LPT Realty platform. But at the end of the day, we need we need people to start selling their houses. Yep. And that's really the the missing piece right now. And I think you're gonna see more of that in 2025. Yep. Interesting concept that you talk about with reducing the principal and then so the interest being on less. That's, that's interesting. It's something that we should probably talk more about, in our 2025 planning. In terms of how to, you know, agents explain that to their to the consumers because that is something that a lot of people don't think about. They just think about the overall, hey. Am I at two percent? I don't wanna go to five percent. Well, like, yeah. Well, your two percent's only on a hundred thousand now. So Right. The benefit may be maybe not as big as what you originally thought. Yeah. We we we saw people do ten year fixed. Right? They're they're already halfway through. Yeah. I mean, if you did a ten year fixed, like, you got five years left. Like, that that two percent rate is not really doing that much for you at this point. Right. You know? And so it's just really understanding where are your consumers and then helping guide them and counsel them through that. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Looking forward to that. We've got some Ascend initiatives that we're gonna be talking through. So today, I think, is, a great day to announce it. So you wanna talk about we're in a, what, a thirty thousand square foot building Yep. That you purchased several years ago. So you wanna talk about what the future of headquarters looks like? Like? Yeah. So it's really interesting. You know, we talked about the Ascend initiative and this commitment that we have to being the number one training company in real estate in 2025. Well, that starts in, like, two weeks. Right? 2025 is right around the corner. And so we've got a couple of slides to talk through this on, if we can get those up. So, you know, we announced the Ascend initiative, back in September, and that was great. And we kinda said, look. This is our goal. You know, the interesting thing is we won this Apex Award from Training Magazine. I didn't think we'd win it until next year, but I think a lot of it had to do with the, yeah. I'm gonna go round of applause here in the audience. Thank you, guys. I think a lot of that had to do with the BBA marathon. You know, like, really, when we we submitted the BBA marathon as a part of that, Apex Award nomination, and I think it really stood out. The fact that we, you know, stood up as a company, we were going through this amazing change in our industry, and the fact that we showed up, we did the five classes a day for, you know, ten days straight, including weekends, and and the amount of training we were able to do, the amount of participation we saw, and so we just continue to push through with that. And so couple of big announcements today as Ascend starts to take shape. So one is this concept of local Ascend master classes. We've got that slide, Dave. Alright. We'll start here, I guess. This was the Ascend initiative slide I used back in September. And, really, these are the five paths that we believe sets LPT Realty up to be able to sit here and say, we have a shot at this. Like, how would how can we become the number one training company in real estate industry when others have not, others chose not to, others didn't do it? Well, we have technology. We have connect 2.0, which is now in the wild in our beta release. Alright. Yeah. Everybody's getting set up there. Dezzi AI, again, our technology sets us up to win here. Our tools, you know, our proprietary tools that complement the training, the done for you solutions, the listing power packs, the active marketing plans, the nine critical questions, the new home buyer workbooks. Like, all of this is stuff that we can not only train on, but then directly put in your hands. That's something we see missing a lot. Agents will take trainings, but then if they don't can actually execute on what's being taught, it's really hard to follow through where we have everything pre executed for you. That's a big part of who LPT is. Local activation, this is one we're gonna talk about today. Local events, I committed to a thousand live in person events, not just what we're gonna do virtually. We're gonna have a thousand in person events in 2025. Our scale, is a single unified national brokerage platform, and we are coming up on that national scale. We've only got a few states left to open, before the end of the year. We're gonna get Canada open by the end of the year. A lot of exciting stuff there. And then the idea of overwhelming force, which is what we did during the BBA marathon, our willingness to overwhelm obstacles and uncertainty uncertainty applied to training. Alright. So let's go to the the next slide here, Dave. Oh, and we're gonna play the Ascend video. Yeah. Let's do it. Connect 2.0 is about connecting you all to each other. And this is the right time in our brokerage's history for us to be very focused on that. As we were building this, I realized it would also become the infrastructure for the most powerful knowledge sharing platform that our industry had ever seen. No longer would knowledge be locked into individual offices and brick and mortars, we would create a way for that knowledge to travel across our entire ecosystem. Because as much as our hybrid share model changed this landscape of this industry forever, LPT Connect 2.0 will do it again. Alright. So I saw a couple requests for that LPT Connect 1.0. Let's drop that into Connect 2.0. We'll throw that in the main stage, make it downloadable so you guys can download it and share it as you wish. This is one of the beautiful things about Connect 2.0. In addition to that, probably starting this week, we're gonna start posting clips from Motivation Monday into MainStage as well in a downloadable format. So in the past, you've just been able to go back and watch, Motivation Monday. We're gonna take clips from Motivation Monday and make them downloadable so you guys can edit them, drop them in, do with them as you wish. So that's an exciting upgrade and update coming as a part of LPT Connect 2.0 as well. We needed the right system in order to give you guys that access, and so Connect 2.0 does it. So as you see in the video, Connect 2.0 is an important part of the Ascend initiative, the technology we have. There's a couple other amazing things we have that we're gonna be rolling out that give us an advantage when it comes to becoming this number one training, company in the real estate industry. So let's throw up our next slide, Dave. These Ascend master classes. So this is actually a concept that we started playing with in the early days of listing power tools. And so when we were growing listing power tools originally as a technology company, we would go into markets and we would invite top producing agents to come sit on panels and share their stories, and then we would have someone from our team host those panels. And then we would give them basically a power pack of marketing collateral to advertise the event so that all the panelists on the event would have flyers and print collateral and and, everything they needed to then get everybody in their sphere energized, and we're really able to bring together these amazing groups of people. And so I'm excited to say we're gonna bring that concept back under this idea of the Ascend Masterclasses. And so we're gonna go around the country with these Ascend Masterclasses, putting together panels of top agents in each local market. There'll be an LPT agent hosting those panels in each market with again, Ascend is is brokerage agnostic for these, local in market events. We're gonna invite all of our peers from other brokerages so that we can share knowledge openly and help each other move to the next level. So the Ascend master classes are an important part of that. We've also got, our Ascend Certified Educator Program that we've got a handful of folks in right now. They're currently teaching our how to build your own Buyer Broker Presentation classes. That's been happening as kind of a beta test around the country. And then one other big thing, go on to the next slide, Dave. There's one other other really cool asset we have that we can use for this training. So, you know, back in two thousand seventeen, I actually bought a college campus. There was a company called ITT Tech that went out of business, and as a part of their bankruptcy, I bought this wonderful thirty thousand square foot university campus, here in Orlando, which is where we're sitting right now. And so, you know, we really have not used this building to its maximum potential. You know, we sit in, like, a small portion of it. There's a section of the building that is offices, but the bulk of this facility was built to be a classroom. And so we took one of the bigger classrooms, and we turned it into the Motivation Monday studio here. But in the first quarter of next year, we're gonna basically be remodeling and updating all of the former classrooms around the building so that we can turn this space back into a university. It's gonna be the Ascend University. And and so the idea is that just like we have a amazing group of agents here today coming in for our video presentation for Motivation Monday, we're gonna have live opportunities for agents to come from all over the country here to the Ascend University campus at the LPT headquarters in Lake Mary, and participate in live training. And so the cool thing here is we're gonna have agents, you know, if you wanna teach classes that would be part of the corporate circles, we're gonna do that right here inside of Ascend University. We've got the space to do it. We've got the parking. Again, this was a college campus before I bought it, and we left it mostly intact as that, because I knew one day we were gonna be returning to this. You know, at at the time, the the thought was to do it as some type of listing power tools university, but here we sit. And with the path we've been on with LPT Realty and the Ascend initiative, this will be the Ascend University here in beautiful Lake Mary, Florida. And and the goal here is to start to open this back up as a university in April. So basically, when I get back from Montana, we get through first quarter. We're gonna be using that to set these rooms up. We'll probably have a dozen different lecture halls that are set up in different ways. Some may be round tables for collaboration. Some will be, you know, long tables all facing a speaker. Some will be classroom style. Some will be theater style. But the idea is that we can bring hundreds of agents in for live trainings at the Ascend University from all over the country as we continue to grow and then take that content and feed it into Connect 2.0 so that everyone who's unable to make the the travel here to Orlando can still participate and still benefit from, those amazing trainings. Next slide, Dave. And so a big part of this is if you remember what we did, for those of you that were at the St. Pete Grand Prix event last year, we turned the Grand Prix into LPT Connect 2.0. Right? We the idea was we we took what LPT Connect 2.0 was going to be, and we turned the conference into the physical representation of Connect 2.0. We had the main stage. We had the training circles. We had the marketing circles, the business generation. Everything that you now see in that navigation bar in Connect 2.0 started at our conference last year, and now we're gonna bring it back full circle by turning the Ascend University campus here into, again, the physical representation of Connect 2.0. So those different classrooms, we're sitting in the main stage circle right now. Right? We're in the Motivation Monday studio. This is the main stage circle. And then we're gonna have business generation circles represented by these classrooms and lecture halls. We're going to have training circles represented by these these lecture halls and classrooms. We're going to have our networking circles represented by these lecture halls. So, again, it's gonna be really neat to take the concept that started at Grand Prix of previewing Connect 2.0 in physical form, then launching Connect 2.0 online, and now basically in April of 2025, we're gonna bring Connect 2.0 back into the real world here at the Ascend University campus in Lake Mary. So, again, really exciting path that I wanna get everybody's radar as we move into 2025. Yeah. Super exciting, man. I mean, you know, when you think about it, I remember when I was on the phone with you when you were you were at the auction, you were bidding for this building, and gosh. I mean, that was what? Almost eight years ago now. I think you're like, what are you gonna do with a university? I'm like, dude, we'll figure that out one day. I mean, it's all you know, it's it's, it's really cool. So the building sits right on I4. It's got great frontage. Yeah. It is like a mile and a half from my house. I'm like, I just gotta I gotta have this asset. Like Right. This, you know, it's got two hundred and some of the parking spots. There's actually room for us to develop more. There's like a half acre of woods that we have entitlement to build more buildings on. Like, it just was a really great opportunity, but there was something about I think with my passion for education and training and helping people ascend and progress to their career, this idea of owning a university building right here made so much sense, and here we are. It's amazing how things come to fruition. Right? Like like, you almost speak things into existence when you stay committed. Seven years ago when I wrote the check to buy this building, I didn't know exactly what the future was gonna hold, but I knew it was something we would be able to use. I knew it was something that in the path I had set out for myself that this was going to happen. And and so here we find ourselves, you know, we launch LPT Realty. We have amazing growth. We make the commitment to the Ascend initiative, and now we're finally able to kinda put this building back to its original intended purpose as a university, which, again, really unique thing to do. I think a lot of a lot of brokerages may have something they call a university, but we actually own a a university here. Right? Like, this this this was an ITT Tech campus. Like, we have a university campus here we get to use for this. So really exciting. I think just one more example of how LPT does things at a different level. Yeah. Absolutely, man. And, you know, it just I think it, when people see us and we pop out of nowhere. Right? They're like, man, you guys were just two years old. You how where'd you guys come from? We're like, well, actually, we've been working on it for for a long time. It just took us you know, we had to be in the right position to to go to the market. So excited about that for 2025. That's gonna be amazing. And when you think about what what type of content we're gonna be putting out, and if you look at the tools that we've put out, I know there's so many agents in this crowd here today is talking about how they have been successful when these tools when you just lean into it, when you use the things that are available to you. And so we wanna make sure we're doing a purposeful approach of educating people on how to get the most from the tools that we offer right with inside of our four walls. And, of course, it's always agent choice. Use whatever you'd like to run your business. But we have so many amazing things that we offer here right inside of LPT to help you grow your business at the absolute highest level. So excited to see this come back in form in the form of a University. Yeah. It's it's intersting, man. The biggest thing we have to overcome is all of these other brokerages have putting been putting out trash tools for, like, decades. Right? And so now we actually we actually put we actually Tell us how you really feel. You know? So we, we actually put out we actually put out stuff that works, but, like, no one wants to believe it works because they've been dealing with the trash everybody else has been putting out for a decade. So, you know, it's really about education. That's why we're doing these videos. Right? We've got to unprogram an industry that just because the tool was created by a brokerage doesn't mean it's trash, even though most brokerages have been putting out trash tools for decades. And, you know, we're changing that dynamic. And and look, I I will promise you, if you use our tools, like, there is nothing in another brokerage like the listing power pack. They may have a box. I think there's a a brokerage recently just selling a box. Like, there's nothing in it. Just so I heard there's a box over at LPT. We too will sell a box. Like, well, guys, it's not the box. It's what's in the box that matters, and it's it's the emptying of the box that matters. But, yes, there is a box involved. But, again, like, our stuff really does work. I mean, I'm telling you, you put an Active Marketing Plan in a seller's hands. You put a Nine Critical Questions in a seller's hands. You take, a Home Buyer Workbook on that initial buyer presentation. You know, you show them the Listing Power Pack. Like, all of these things we built work because as a marketer who self funded his companies and bootstrapped everything, like, the stuff I built had to work. Like, we didn't have a lot of room to just make dumb stuff up and then and then let it fail. Like, we had to build tools that worked, and that's really what LPT is all about. And so we've got everybody here to to to share those stories, to try to help everyone who's not here understand that, like, yeah, these tools actually do work. Just because they're built by a brokerage doesn't mean they're trash. And so that that's an important part of this. And then now you take that to the next level with Ascend and the education, Because I know that if we can empower our agents with the best tools, the best training, and really mean that, right, not just a tagline, not just a slogan, not just, oh, we have marketing. Like, yeah, we have marketing and training. Come on. Like, right? Everybody says they have marketing and training. We really have marketing, and we really have training. But it's again, you gotta communicate that because the industry is so jaded. And look, I don't blame agents for feeling that way because, again, the quality of what's been called great training and the quality of what's been called great marketing has just been terrible for so long that we have to basically untrain. We have to undo the damage that was done, and we're gonna do that. Like, we're committed to that. You know? We we built these tools. We are investing in Ascend. We are committed to this process, understanding that we literally have to have to convince a whole bunch of people that for the first time ever, we're actually doing it the right way, and we actually are providing things that can move the needle for you. We are actually a brokerage that can help you close a few more transactions a year. This concept of keep more, close more at LPT. Again, all the things that are just sound bites everywhere else are real here, and that that's important. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, I know we've got just a couple minutes left. I wanna make sure we get through everything. We've got shareholders meeting today. What should we be thinking about for shareholders if you're interested in in understanding what that's like? Wanna just give us a quick preview? Yeah. So shareholder meeting is at four o'clock today. We're gonna do it, here in the in the Ascend University campus over in the what we call the white conference room. Jeff Whiteside's here for that. We're gonna put that together. When you log in to Connect, anytime after about about three PM, you will see that tile, Shareholder Meeting, similar to the tile you click on to get into, into Motivation Monday. That's the tile you will use. Again, it'll say Shareholder Meeting. It'll light up around three o'clock today. You can only log in from inside of Connect. There is no third party link. This is only for current LPT agents to be able to log in and take advantage and participate in our shareholder meeting. We're gonna share a lot of great information around kind of the future of the company, you know, where we're going. It it's interesting, like, most people understand about this much of what LPT, holdings is actually built to be. You know, we are somewhere in phase one of this very long detailed plan that we cooked up a long time ago, and some of this stuff we're gonna give broad strokes on today. We can't share everything because, again, we're not trying to completely empower our competition with a road map because what we are building is is unique, and we've definitely kept some things close to the chest, you know, over the over the couple years we've been here, but to kinda lay out exactly where we're going, what that looks like. And so that's gonna happen at shareholders today. You can log in to that through LPT Connect. So make sure you're there four o'clock eastern time today. The tile will go live around three o'clock today. There's gonna be, there's gonna be an interesting some interesting Ascend stuff there. We've got some some new things we're gonna be releasing that are tied to Ascend as well that we're gonna announce at shareholder today. So, again, just, really exciting stuff on the horizon. Next week, we're gonna be announcing some new openings. So we've got some additional states that are about to open. We've got some international stuff that's about to open. So you definitely wanna tune in to Motivation Monday next week. I'll be in Montana, but we're gonna have some new expansion stuff going on next week. And, other than that, man, I think we, again, just an amazing year. We've got a couple of weeks left. So we've got a couple of what do we have? Three two Motivation Mondays left? Two left. Two more Motivation Mondays. Make sure you catch them all. Make sure you stay up to date. A lot of things coming, as we come through the end of the year, as we get the final states open, as we officially go international. Just so much amazing stuff on horizon for LPT Realty. If you're an LPT Plus member, I will see you at noon, on the LPT Plus mastermind. Christina's here in the audience somewhere. She's live. Yep. Hey, Christina. Big round of applause for her. Christina's here live in the audience, and, we're gonna be doing that from noon here from the the the campus, and then shareholders at four o'clock, and then the fireside chat at eight o'clock tonight. So we'll see you guys a couple more times. Other than that, go make it a great week, and we'll see you here back next week. Alright. Awesome.