In commercial real estate, where deal flow often speaks louder than brand and relationships outweigh reputations, marketing leadership rarely commands the same gravitas as brokerage. Yet, Wendy Forsythe’s recognition as a GlobeSt. 2026 Woman of Influence proves that the intangible power of brand is a formidable competitive advantage, elevating marketing from a support role to a strategic cornerstone.
GlobeSt. is a premier online destination for commercial real estate content, and its Women of Influence program has tracked the careers of the people who have demonstrably moved the market for years. The 2026 honoree list spans every sector of the CRE spectrum, and the selection process filters for measurable, market-level impact.
Building a Brand in a Crowded Market
Wendy’s career reads less like a traditional marketing track and more like a practitioner’s education in what it takes for a real estate organization to grow with discipline. She began her career more than 25 years ago, operating as a high-producing agent before ever holding a corporate role. She then moved through executive positions at Royal LePage, Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, Carrington Real Estate Services, HomeSmart International, and Fathom Holdings, before serving as a regional president at Compass covering California, Nevada, and Hawaii. During that tenure, she pushed agent retention to 98%, a metric that reflects something more durable than campaign performance.
When she joined eXp as chief marketing officer in April 2024, she brought that operator’s lens to the brand strategy role. The results have been measurable. Under her leadership, eXp launched a partnership with Canva Enterprise that created a branded, plug-and-play marketing platform that’s now actively used by more than 33,000 agents and advisors and responsible for generating over 427,000 marketing assets. The platform is designed around a core conviction Wendy has carried throughout her career: that advisors build better businesses when they have the brand infrastructure to present themselves with consistency and confidence.
That philosophy shapes the approach eXp Commercial advisors experience in practice. The platform is built so that individual advisors can develop and grow their own brand identity — their market niche, their voice, their client relationships — while drawing on the credibility, tools, and reach of the eXp enterprise behind them. Last year’s full brand refresh for eXp Commercial, led by Wendy’s vision, brought coherence and structural flexibility to serve hundreds of advisors building distinctly individual practices. At scale, that means commercial advisors are backed by one of the most recognized names in real estate without being required to subordinate their own market identity to it.
Why This Matters for Commercial Real Estate Specifically
For commercial advisors, the eXp platform offers something that compounds over time: access to a referral network that spans both the commercial and residential sides of the business. eXp Realty’s footprint — one of the largest independent residential brokerages in the world — means that commercial advisors benefit from a steady flow of warm introductions from residential colleagues whose clients are acquiring investment properties, relocating businesses, or expanding into new markets. That cross-platform referral dynamic is a structural advantage that most commercial-only platforms simply cannot replicate, and it grows in value as both sides of the network scale.
The brand infrastructure Wendy has built amplifies that advantage. For commercial advisors evaluating where or how to build their business, the question of platform credibility is real. Clients in CRE vet the advisor and the infrastructure behind them, and a marketing platform that helps advisors show up with consistency across listings, outreach, thought leadership, and client communication is a meaningful differentiator in the field. GlobeSt.’s recognition of Wendy positions eXp’s marketing leadership squarely within the commercial real estate mainstream.
“When you stop copying someone else’s blueprint and start building around your X-Factor, the friction disappears — and the business you actually want becomes possible.”
– Wendy Forsythe, CMO, eXp Commercial
That sentiment — drawn from her recently released book, Leverage Your X-Factor, in which she lays out a six-part framework for business clarity across Focus, Action, Community, Technology, Operations, and Resilience — is the same ethos behind how eXp Commercial approaches advisor development. The platform exists to accelerate what the advisor is already building, not to define it for them.
Leadership Quality as a Market Signal
Beyond her marketing mandate, Wendy is an executive advisor for eXp’s Women’s Impact Network and sits on the board of eXp Extend a Hand, the company’s 501(c)(3) supporting agents and advisors facing financial hardship. She donated all proceeds from her book to that same fund — a signal of the institutional culture taking shape around the platform.
In a market where advisor retention, community, and long-term business-building have become the defining variables between platforms, leadership quality is a legitimate predictor of platform quality. Wendy’s place on the 2026 GlobeSt. Women of Influence list is one more signal that eXp Commercial is being built by people operating at the highest level of the industry.
GlobeSt. will honor the 2026 WOI class at its annual awards dinner in Denver, Colorado on July 13, 2026.