eXp Health Insurance for Agents

Healthcare is a big issue in the real estate business. The National Association of Realtors has been trying to make that happen and make it legal to do it. They've never been able to do it, and that's a problem. Because I can tell you that in my world, I know a number of agents who make good money but don't have health insurance, and the reason is, it's because it's just the way the system is.

If you make above a certain amount of money, and almost all of our agents cross that, what happens is you just don't have the options, affordable options, especially if you're older or something like that. You just don't have good choices in North Carolina. You pretty much have Blue Cross or Blue Cross and it's kind of a monopoly. So that is really the only option because agents are 1099 independent contractors. So you can't really have a normal group plan like you can for employees.

Well, that is a huge benefit for me looking at eXp. That was one of the first calls that I made when I was exploring this opportunity over the last number of months. I called their insurance wing who handles their insurance and I wanted to know. I had them quote my personal for my family, and right now we're paying almost $2,000. Now the quote I got was for around $1,100.

Now, I haven't gone as far as to check coverage and all these kinds of things, because we have to check with providers and things like that. But I do know that they have a number of different options for agents. Now, the agents don't have to do it, okay, but they have the option to do it. And that is just something that just isn't there in the regular environment and the regular paradigm of real estate brokers right now.

So I think you're going to see more and more people embrace that because healthcare is a big issue. I mean, it's one of those deals. It's not a problem until it's a problem. And we've seen some of our agents go through some really tough challenges in the last years or two, as we all have, certainly in the last year. And the ones that had the insurance, I can tell you that was a different mindset and there was security there versus the worry. I mean, if you're sick, the last thing you want to do is worry about paying for it.

So I really am going to encourage our agents to look at healthcare. I can't make them do it, but it is a wonderful option. And it's nice too because you can get into it anytime. You don't have to wait for the open enrollment, like the typical annual thing that you'd have to do. And again, you can use it or you can not use it, but at least you have a healthcare alternative.