eXp Realty is one of the largest real estate brokerages in the world, with more than 83,000 agents operating across dozens of countries, entirely without physical offices. That scale and remote-first nature make software the backbone of their business: from internal communications to their public brand, they’re a digital-first operation.
As the company grew, so did its reliance on expensive, inflexible SaaS tools. Per-seat pricing ballooned, vendors moved slowly, and off-the-shelf software increasingly failed to meet eXp’s needs. Seth Siegler, Chief Innovation Officer at eXp began asking a fundamental question: Can we empower non-technical subject matter experts to build their dream software, rather than paying for tools that are expensive and ill-fitting?
Using Lovable, eXp has replaced or is actively replacing major SaaS platforms, launched mission-critical software faster than ever before, and saved millions of dollars annually, all while empowering non-technical teams to build and own the tools they use every day.
eXp’s challenges weren’t unique, but at their scale, frustrations with their SaaS tools became overwhelming. Expensive, slow-moving, and clunky vendor software hindered their velocity and stifled their growth in many areas.
First, SaaS spend scaled faster than the business. As eXp expanded internationally, each new country, agent, and department added SaaS costs. Many tools charged per seat, per agent, or per listing, meaning growth directly increased spend. “The more we grew, the worse that was going to be,” said Seth.
SaaS vendors also couldn’t move fast enough. eXp’s international expansion required country-specific websites, property search, agent microsites, localization, and integrations with dozens of local CRMs. Traditional vendors took months to deliver, and when timelines slipped, eXp had little control. In one case, a website vendor went on vacation days before a country launch, leaving eXp without a public site for an event with hundreds of attendees.
Finally, SaaS tools felt “one size fits all.” From intranet tools to agent websites, off-the-shelf platforms forced eXp into rigid workflows. Discoverability was poor, customization was limited, and internal teams spent time working around tools instead of building with them.
eXp had experimented early with AI-assisted development, using ChatGPT, Cursor, and the OpenAI API well before they were mainstream. But most tools were still too technical for non-engineers. eXp Founder Glenn Sanford discovered Lovable in early 2025 and when he showed it to Seth, eXp went all-in on leveraging it as their primary AI software development platform. "When I saw what was possible with Lovable, I realized the barrier between having an idea and building it had finally dissolved. It allows us to move at the speed of our imagination," said eXp Realty Founder, Glenn Sanford.
eXp’s international division is the fastest-growing part of the business. Each new country launch brings new agents, new customers, and new revenue. It also brings a set of technical requirements: a localized marketing site, property search portal, CRM integrations, and thousands of agent microsites, all expected to work on day one.
For years, eXp relied on a single external vendor to handle this work. The arrangement was expensive, slow, and brittle. Every country's tech stack lives in its own silo, each with a different CRM and website. Microsites were priced per agent at $11 per month, which meant costs increased linearly as the company grew. Even small changes required coordination, waiting, and ongoing maintenance fees.
In one instance, eXp found themselves without a website 24 hours before a major launch event around their expansion into Peru. Instead of scrambling for another agency, Sarah Hutchinson, who leads international marketing, opened Lovable and built the site herself.
“Sarah built it in Lovable, and it looked better than what we were going to get from the vendor,” Seth says.
That moment changed how eXp approached international infrastructure. The Peru site became the template for a broad replatforming of 26 country sites. Using Lovable, the team created a custom CMS for country sites, a self-service portal for agent microsites, and a backend service that normalized data from more than 25 different CRMs into a single API. This meant the team now owned their frontend and backend, end-to-end.
The impact was immediate. Cancelling the vendor contract meant the per-agent fees were eliminated. The high quality of the sites reduced support tickets from agents by 85%. And owning their own implementation allowed eXp Realty to improve and expand the sites themselves, with nothing lost in translation between customer and vendor.
It’s saved us millions of dollars. And we’ve come out with better solutions.
Sara Hutchinson, VP, International Marketing added "A failed vendor and a missed deadline forced our hand. Lovable gave us our power back. In 6 hours, we launched a site we owned end-to-end. That single build scaled into 26 country websites with agent microsites and property search, replacing what we were quoted as a multi-year, multi-million-dollar effort."
As we’ve moved additional workflows into Lovable, internal support tickets have dropped by over 70%. Lovable fundamentally changed how we build, ship, and scale.
For years, Facebook Workplace served as the digital heart of eXp’s community, and it worked exceptionally well. However, when Meta announced the platform's sunset, eXp had to pivot. The company adopted Slack for real-time messaging, but quickly realized that at eXp’s massive scale, Slack operates differently. It excels at chat, but the 'community' layer—discoverability, distinct groups, and news feeds—was missing.
Rather than adding another expensive SaaS tool to fill that void—potentially costing upwards of $1M annually—Founder Glenn Sanford turned to Lovable. He built 'The Hub' to sit alongside Slack, specifically designing it to handle the community workflows that Slack wasn’t built for. Because he built it himself, the product reflected firsthand knowledge of exactly what the agents had lost, restoring their culture without the bloat of a generic tool.
The Hub was unveiled at eXp’s annual conference in Miami.
The platform is owned and maintained internally, which allows the company to evolve it as needs change rather than waiting on a vendor’s roadmap. Best of all, the per-seat costs that once scaled with headcount are no longer part of the equation.
“The Hub is built by us and for us so it gives us unique features that could never be offered by a SaaS provider who sells to a whole base of customers. Plus since we’re leveraging Lovable, we can iterate at warp speed.” Seth Says.
The shift at eXp didn’t stop with international websites or The Hub. Once teams saw what was possible, instead of asking which vendor to buy, they started asking whether they needed a vendor at all.
One of the first targets was custom chatbot functionality of ChatGPT Enterprise. eXp rebuilt the experience internally using the OpenAI and Google Gemini API’s, tailored it to their workflows, and removed per-seat pricing entirely. The result was a better product at a fraction of the cost, saving the company roughly $1M per year. Other applications followed. HR built internal tools for their operations, running in separate Lovable and Supabase environments to meet compliance requirements.
What’s started to solidify is a different way of working inside the company. People closest to the work are empowered to create the tools they need, even if those tools only serve a single team. Many are small. Most would never have risen to the top of the engineering roadmap. Together, they remove friction across the company.
We’ve been able to launch a lot of software that just never would have come up in a roadmap.
At eXp, software decisions are no longer permanent commitments. Tools are built, evaluated, and replaced as the business evolves. In that world, no SaaS contract is sacred. Every one of them is up for reconsideration. As Seth says:
“Every SaaS is on the chopping block.”
