EXp Realty’s top two teams have joined forces, the brokerage exclusively revealed to Inman on Wednesday.
The Whissel Realty Group and Beer Home Team will now operate as the Whissel Beer Group, with more than 220 agents and staff members across five offices in San Diego and Riverside Counties. The teams have a lifetime sales volume of $7 billion, with $1 billion in sales in 2024 alone. The Whissel Realty Group and Beer Home Team were featured on Real Trends’ 2024 Best Real Estate Mega Teams list, earning the 24th and 86th spots.
“Whissel Beer Group is breaking ground on what the future of real estate teams looks like,” eXp Realty CEO Leo Pareja said in a prepared statement. “This merger is not only one of the largest in industry history; it also perfectly aligns with our mission of building the most agent-centric brokerage on the planet.”
Whissel Realty Group founder Kyle Whissel will serve as the CEO of the Whissel Beer Group, while Beer Home Team founder Daniel Beer will take on the role of president. Chris VanderValk, the Chief Operating Officer of Whissel Realty Group, will retain his position.
Daniel Beer
“For the past seven years, Kyle and I have partnered through the Fast Forward Movement, and that collaboration has been better than we ever imagined,” Beer said in a written statement. “Now, we’re taking that partnership to the next level by merging our teams into one unified structure. This is about pulling the best people, systems and strategies together to make it easy for agents to get back to doing what they love — helping clients, being profitable and having fun again.”
In an interview with Inman, Whissel and Beer said the merger is the culmination of 15 years of friendship and collaboration.
“The level of mutual respect between the two of us is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Anytime he’s adamant about going a particular direction, I trust him, and we go that direction, and he’s right 99 percent of the time, and he has that same level of mutual respect for me in return,” Whissel said. “It’s been this amazing relationship. It’s everything you could ever ask for out of a partnership.”
“We’ve run our teams separately for the last seven and a half years,” he added. “And over the last 12 months, we started having some conversations about what it would look like to not run our two teams side by side, and instead run them together.”
Beer said their initial conversations consisted of jostling ideas around; however, two months in, they began taking a more serious tone as the duo began looking at market and industry trends, which signaled that now was the time to merge.
“What became really clear to us is that the industry is moving into a time of really, really professionalizing itself,” he said. “It’s going from cities with tens and tens of thousands of agents, all with all this dispersed energy, to a consolidation process because so many of the opportunities that exist at scale are coming from enterprise-level organizations and companies.”
Beer and Whissel said that consumers more than ever are looking for professionalism, which requires teams to elevate their structure, systems and processes, and change their growth mindset from going wide to going deep.
“Instead of both trying to pursue our growth goals side by side, we can now apply energy to the exact same effort,” Beer said. “When you’re able to have that concentrated energy, instead of having it be dispersed, it has an exponential effect. You don’t go twice as fast — you go several times faster, several times deeper, and you can deliver on what the goal is, which is to have an operating system for agents to be able to deliver on more sales efficiently, so they can have a life that’s great, that’s comfortable, and they can enjoy with their families.”
Kyle Whissel
The duo said their respective leadership teams complement each other well and have laid the foundation for a strong Whissel Beer Group executive suite.
“My director of sales, Rachel, has off-the-charts emotional intelligence. She is an amazing people person, and she loves to manage people and run an entire department, but she hasn’t been out in the field, and she’s never been a real estate agent before, so she doesn’t have that boots-on-the-ground experience,” Whissel said. “Well, Dan’s person, Brian, fills that sales experience in. Brian has had years where he sold over $100 million himself as a member of Beer Home Team.”
“And so now you have that amazing complementary skill set where Brian can do what he does best, which is work with the agents on all of the sales skills that are necessary to be a top agent,” he added. “And Rachel can do her thing and her genius, which is overseeing this entire sales organization, which is something that Brian doesn’t love to do.”
Beer and Whissel said the first 60 to 90 days of the merger will focus on identifying the best aspects of their individual systems and processes, and carefully merging them, so their teams have a smooth transition into the Whissel Beer Group.
“Day One, we don’t want to throw anything out that they’re doing, and they don’t want to throw anything out that we’re doing, because we’ve sold over $3 billion each,” Whissel said. “They obviously have a lot of amazing things, and so do we.”
Although mergers and acquisitions are abundant, the duo said it’s not a decision to make on the fly — it has to align with your personal and business goals.
“We believe that there are a lot of people who’ve fallen into that trap and felt pressured to build these big teams,” Whissel said. “They didn’t think about that enough upfront: If I start a team with 10 agents and five staff, that’s 15 people I have to manage. They never wanted to manage people. They just wanted to sell more homes. And they thought the path to selling more homes was having more people. Yeah, but it’s not always the path.”
Beer and Whissel said their client has always been the agent, which made a merger the correct decision as they eye expansion opportunities in California and other markets along the West Coast.
“Everything we do is about positioning our agents to help them accomplish their goals,” Whissel said. “So, we’re about serving the person who fell into the ‘you’ve got to start a team’ trap. We want to put them in a position to help them accomplish their goal, which was actually to sell more homes.”
While numbers, logistics and aligned business goals are crucial pieces of the merger question, Beer said he urges leaders to ask a more personal question before diving into the deep end.
“Will this bring me back to happy?” he said. “There are so many agents that have attended conferences where they’ve heard from a stage or from a panel a conversation about team leaders. And frankly, we might even be guilty of it, because we’re constantly talking about team building. Agents consistently have heard about being a team leader, as if that were the one and only path.”
“So you have a lot of people that have gone from being very profitable, from being able to sustainably provide for their families, from being happy, from interacting with their buyers and sellers, and just being happy to suddenly being buried in things they never really signed up for,” he added. “So, for us, and for anybody else, they should be asking, ‘How do I get back to happy? How do I get back to profit? How do I get back to the path that I’m truly meant for?”
