After scaling Real and eXp, Erinn Nobel wants to build a brokerage with intention

After years of honing the craft of brokerage growth and development at firms like The Real Brokerage and eXp Realty, Erinn and Peter Nobel decided to use their skills to found and launch ENRG. Realty in January 2024. 

After starting her real estate career in 1999 as an agent at a boutique brokerage in Washington state, Erinn Nobel eventually found herself joining a fledgling eXp Realty affiliate where she would go on to become a regional growth leader.

In 2020, just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nobel’s career arc took her and husband Peter, a former Microsoft systems leader and eventual chief operating officer at eXp, to Real. 

“I brought 1,600 agents over within a matter of months, grew revenue 885% — we set the trajectory of the company, rebuilt their back-end technology system, redesigned the agent revenue share model, built the culture and the vision statements, and we had a lot of fun doing it, but we were totally burnt out,” Erinn Nobel told HousingWire.

“We just looked at ourselves and I said, ‘We are the ones with the knowledge; let’s do this for ourselves and launch a company that is built very intentionally.” 

Boutique service on a national scale

It’s with this in mind that the Nobels created ENRG. Realty, which Erinn Nobel describes as both a virtual brokerage with a national platform that is also a boutique firm.

“We have that human-to-human contact and support,” she said. “It is really about using technology to support that human interaction. We are never going to have our agents answer to a bot. Humans understand the real estate life cycle and we are not outsourcing the support.”  

While Nobel said the company has resources and support for agents readily available through their technology, agents can also quickly access support from a human broker. 

“We feel the only way a virtual company is going to be successful is by having really well-educated and knowledgeable managing brokers in each state that are empowered to make decisions and run their state, because they understand what the local culture there is like and things can really differ from state to state,” she said. 

Growth trajectory

Although the firm launched in January 2024, it wasn’t until January 2025 that things really began heating up, with the company announcing plans to launch in Florida, Washington, Ohio and Texas. The firm is currently in 16 states, but Nobel said growth has been slow. 

“It has been a weird year,” she said. “I think everybody came out of the lawsuit and the settlement, and then we had all of the acquisitions, and they are just frozen trying to figure out what is going on.” 

In addition to market dynamics, Nobel also attributed the firm’s slower pace of growth to the fact that they don’t take just any agent. In order to join the firm, agents must be in production and meet ENRG production requirements.

“We’re not a fit for brand-new agents, and we’re not a company here just to recruit agents and help people become rich through revenue share,” Nobel said. 

Revenue share without a recruitment focus

Despite this stance on recruitment, ENRG. Realty does have a revenue share model, but Nobel said the firm does not want its agents to be “distracted by recruiting.” 

“We offer recruiting as a service, where the agent simply introduces us to a potential recruit, and we then have a team that handles all of the recruiting. That helps keep both the recruiting agent’s brand intact, and it helps ensure that our reputation stays intact and that we are making sure that the recruit really aligns with our company,” she said. 

In addition to offering revenue sharing, ENRG. also offers a five-tier equity award system that’s based on production, incentivizing agents with stock, as Nobel said they plan to eventually take the company public. 

“It is an expensive process, so we need to be thoughtful about when we initiate the process,” Nobel said. “We got to ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange when we were at Real, and I can’t wait to do that again.” 

For now, though, Nobel said she is focused on building out the business with intention.

“We are not looking to be the biggest company in the world. We are looking to go international and we will be moving into Canada at some point soon, but it is really about being in a true business partnership with our agents,” she said.

“We want to be an answer in a platform to any type of way a group is structured — from an independent brand that wants to keep their branding but have back-end support, to a team that wants to scale nationally, to a small mother-daughter team. It is really about being able to cater to and create the right fit for where that agent is right now. It is also about being flexible and about listening to what the agents need, and being nimble enough so that we can support them into the future.”