The Last Standalone Show — Real Brokerage Ties Its Future to the RE/MAX Close

Agent count tops 36,000, revenue up 30% to $700M, and HeyLeo becomes the AI glue for a combined ~$190M-EBITDA platform if the Aug 14 vote passes.

REAX · Earnings Call · 2026-08-06

The Last Standalone Show

Tamir Poleg opened the call with unusual framing: “I want to frame today's call a little differently than usual as this could be the last time we report to you as a stand-alone Real.” — Tamir Poleg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer · 2026-08-06 The RE/MAX transaction — security holder vote set for August 14, close targeted for H2 2026 — dominated every line of the script. Rather than present the quarter in isolation, management used it as a preview of the combined company: an integration management office has been stood up, leaders named across every major work stream, and the previously committed $30 million in cost synergies reaffirmed, with Jenna Rozenblat doubling as Chief Integration Officer for "day 1 readiness."

as we noted back in April, on a pro forma basis, the 2 companies generated approximately $160 million of combined adjusted EBITDA in 2025. If you layer on the $30 million of run rate synergies that we publicly committed to, that number moves to roughly $190 million. And we see that as a floor, not a ceiling.
Ravi Jani, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-08-06

The deal is already a recruiting accelerant. “the announcement of the RE/MAX deal definitely gave us some tailwinds in terms of agents reaching out or teams reaching out and contemplating joining Real.” — Tamir Poleg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer · 2026-08-06 The pitch to franchise owners — modern tech stack, AI, and optional entry into Real's revenue share — is designed to preserve the RE/MAX model while making the network's economics Real-like. Notably, the prior call's early nervousness ("very quickly, it shifted to a lot of excitement on the RE/MAX network side") has given way to concrete operational planning, not just enthusiasm.

Growth vs. Margin Math in a Four-Million-Home Market

Set against one of the worst housing backdrops in years, the standalone numbers are striking. Revenue rose 30% to $700.6M; closed transactions jumped 27% to a record 62,380; adjusted EBITDA was up 38% to $27.6M. Tamir frames the macro headwind as "nearly 20% below" the typical 5.2 million existing-home-sales run rate for three straight years. The company keeps taking share in that housing market and expects to keep doing so with or without a recovery: “Our focus is on continuing to execute and expanding our share of the market that's available today regardless of market conditions.” — Tamir Poleg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer · 2026-08-06 The cost of that growth is margin mix. Gross margin slipped to 8.3% from 8.9%, driven by the growing share of capped-agent transactions (42% of sides, up 300bp YoY) — "the economic trade-off for retaining our highest producing agents," per CFO Ravi Jani. For Q3 he guides gross margin lower YoY but with a smaller gap: “we do expect gross margin to be lower year-over-year, albeit I wouldn't expect the same order of magnitude of a decline as we saw in Q2.” — Ravi Jani, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-08-06 September fee-model changes and the ancillary ramp are meant to flatten the curve by Q4. It is the same tension analysts probed all year — but the merger changes the math: RE/MAX's franchise model brings less cyclicality and higher margins to the combined business. While much of the market fixates on tariff refunds and AI data centers this quarter, Real's call is conspicuously free of the tariff conversation that saturated peer calls. Its exogenous shock is the merger, not trade policy. The balance sheet is the counterweight:

We ended the quarter with a record $86.6 million in unrestricted cash and short-term investments, up from $49.9 million at the start of the year. Subject to the satisfaction of remaining closing conditions for the RE/MAX transaction, we expect to prioritize debt repayment and deleveraging following closing.
Ravi Jani, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-08-06

Earlier, management had pegged the deleveraging goal at reaching 2x net debt to adjusted EBITDA by the end of the second full fiscal year post-close — a target now backed by record cash.

Leo 2.0 and the Ancillary Flywheel

The most genuinely new product news is HeyLeo 2.0, deep in beta roughly two weeks before the call. The AI platform now integrates with major CRMs, automatically activating, engaging and nurturing dormant leads, with "close to 90%" MLS transaction coverage in the U.S. and all of Canada. The early signals are the kind any AI vendor would envy: “Leo was able to create opportunities for them with dormant leads that were lying in their CRMs for years… Leo is generating revenue for the agents.” — Tamir Poleg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer · 2026-08-06 The follow-on is the agent productivity flywheel: mortgage and title flows are being wired into Leo so it can offer One Real Mortgage and One Real Title solutions mid-transaction. Ancillary revenue already grew 28% to $4.2M (wallet +140%, title +29%, mortgage +10%), with title attach at 45% inside JVs and 67% in Texas — the lever is simply getting more top producers into those JVs. This echoes the platform-stickiness thesis from prior calls — “the platform just becomes more-and-more sticky” — Tamir Poleg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer · 2025-10-30 — now operationalized through AI rather than incentives. There is a subtle irony in the timing: Real is betting that technology — not a housing rebound — compounds the combined company's advantage, in a quarter when the market's AI trade is broadly selling off across the tape. Whether August 14's vote passes and the ~$190M-EBITDA platform lands on schedule, the standalone story is effectively ending with both durable growth and a fully funded pivot in hand.