The Lifetime Home Support Model That Helped Build a Top Real Estate Team

Amy Stockberger (00:00)
Because they’re running into people in their sphere. is it, like, 40-some percent of your sphere is going to transact in the next 12 months with how our market is right now? So even though we have people who are in those great low interest rates, ⁓ they know somebody who has a have-to situation or a life change coming up. So what we’re doing is making sure, using the Gary Keller rule of thumb that he wrote out in the Millionaire Real Estate Agent that

Humans have two places in their brains for Real Estate agents. Your job is to always kick that other person’s name out so that when somebody in their sphere has a life change, you’re the brand they’re talking about. That’s what this does is that our program turns one client into five more. that, yeah, and it just gives a referral after referral after referral because they’re so happy with you that they want everybody in their tribe to come work with us too. And it’s brand awareness on steroids too.

Dylan Silver (00:42)
Expanding your sphere.

folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, Amy Stockberger, is the founder of the number one Real Estate team in South Dakota, number 33 in the nation. And she’s also the creator of the Lifetime Home Support Model. She’s built her business around her philosophy of serve, serve, serve, sell, and focuses on creating scalable referral-driven systems that help agents generate repeat business, improve retention.

and build long-term enterprise value through client relationships and additional revenue streams. Amy, thanks for joining us today.

Amy Stockberger (03:02)
Thanks for having me, Dylan. I’m so excited to be here and share with your great audience. Bravo.

Dylan Silver (03:08)
Great to meet you, it’s great to have you. Now, I’d like to start off at the top by asking you about your serve, serve, serve, sell philosophy and what made you realize that maybe the traditional transaction model was broken.

Amy Stockberger (03:25)
Well, I was ⁓ in the business for about 10 years, and it was about 2014, and I was doing everything wrong, right? That’s what you do when you’re an entrepreneur. You figure out all the ways not to do things so you can do them right. But I’m very system-driven, so systems are a superpower. And we were just killing the before and during part of the transaction. And I couldn’t really figure out why we weren’t getting more repeat and referral business. If they were so happy with the before and during,

Why weren’t they all just coming back and bringing more of their tribe? And I thought I was so smart back then because at that time I was running this billboard ad campaign to about 30 grand a year. And the billboard ad campaign’s goal was to remind the people who knew like entrusted me to use me again. That was the only campaign goal I wanted out of it. And guess what? Spoiler alert. It didn’t work. Had nothing to do with them. It wasn’t serving them. It was a brand awareness at best. was a

giant waste of money. And so I went down ⁓ the rabbit hole and had to have some really extreme ownership on, know, okay, what were my points of difference? How was I different in our market? What were my unique value propositions? And what I found was devastating because at that time we were a small team, ⁓ small but mighty, and our unique value propositions were that we were the local best at connecting buyers and sellers.

Yeah, old buyers, we could help you find a home that matches your price and your parameters. And sellers, guess what? This is like crazy. We could help you sell your house for the most amount of money, shortest amount of time, least amount of hassle.

Yeah. That’s the Webster’s Dictionary of our job. Of course I should be able to do that. And that’s what everybody else in my market was saying, too. It wasn’t a unique value proposition. It was literally the basic bottom.

Dylan Silver (05:44)
Yeah.

Amy Stockberger (05:58)
of the barrel of what they expected of us. It’s like a joke, but it’s like an attorney having a billboard that says, I passed the bar, hire me. I that’s basically what we’re all saying. Like, I’m going to do my core job. And so I went to, you know, in a search for something to copy and paste. They’re like, OK, what can I add in that was going to take care of clients for life? I wanted to be a part of the before, the during, and the forever for not only, you know, our clients, but also for our agents to help our agents build.

referable, scalable, and ultimately sellable businesses, because I also noticed a big hole at that time, too, that our industry wasn’t setting agents up for success in exiting. There wasn’t really a clear plan for helping them build a business that they could actually one day sell. The standard tradition in our industry is really mic drop, walk out, and maybe get a 25 % here or there. But if you build a service-centric, relationship-based business, it can be worth like 50 to 100 % more.

Dylan Silver (06:45)
Yeah.

Amy Stockberger (06:54)
So I wanted to build something that, again, took care of clients before, during, and forever for our clients and our agents. And so we created ⁓ what we call our lifetime home support model, which runs on the foundation of serve, serve, serve, then sell. Authentically serving all their wants and needs and desires before ours outside of our core competencies, which are just connecting buyers and sellers. Not just, that’s a big part of the human experience. But our programs include different things like ⁓

a system and strategy for every step of the home buying and selling process before, during, and forever. So for the very first homeowner who is stepping out of rental into homeownership, we have a lease buyout program. To the very last seller who’s selling their last house going into senior care, we have our Golden Age Guided Move program to really everything in between, like a guaranteed sale, instant offer, love it or leave it. But our core, our lifetime home support core unique value propositions are our VIP club and our home support team, which is a vendor program.

And now we just launched another really great ⁓ value prop for our community, which is our Lifetime Home Hub. But our VIP club allows our clients to use all of our VIP equipment for life for free. So our moving trucks, moving supplies. We have party supplies, cotton candy, snow cone, popcorn machines, tools, carpet cleaners, ladders, specialty tools that people don’t want to rent by our store. All branded to us.

Now these humans have all these things that happen in their lives. They have all these parties that they’re going to, they’re wanting to throw, all these things that they do, they come and check out these pieces of equipment for free for life, bring them to these parties with all of their friends and family around with our brand everywhere. The repeat and referral business comes from the law of reciprocity. We’re staying a part of their human experience at all these times in their life. And with the tools, we know it’s hard to own a home. The jig is out, it’s hard.

And a lot of people don’t want to rent buy or store these things, so we have them. So I built out software. I systemize the whole thing. I monetize the whole thing at a high level so that we can be of service to our clients when they need us. And I built out software so that when a client checks out a piece of equipment, my agents get notified so that they can make that human-to-human connection in the time that it matters. And we have found that this is, 90-some percent of our business is traced back right now to repeat and referral.

But it’s allowed us to be number one in our market since about two years after we built our program. We’ve been number one in our market since 2017. We’re number 33 in the nation coming from South Dakota, the fifth least populated state, ranked by real trends. And we have 20-some agents who dominate 10 % of the local market share. My agents, year after year after year, have the highest production per agent than anybody in our market. And I’m helping them build.

Referable scalable and sellable businesses in a way that’s fun. They’re working with the people who know like and trust them They’re working with people who are coming back to them wanting to be in the ecosystem And we have because of that and we’re helping our agents do that and grow at such a nice level ⁓ We have an average agent tenure of seven years, which is really high for our industry and we saw We saw during that whole time that okay. Well, how else could we serve them?

Dylan Silver (10:00)
Wow.

Yeah.

Amy Stockberger (10:43)
Because we as Real Estate agents are super connectors, right? We get to connect buyers and sellers, and then we get to connect our clients to everything else they need. They come to us for referrals on everything. HVAC, dentists, electrician, painters, home cleaners. And so we decided to put together a built out of vendor network of the top local pros in our market who give our clients legendary care like us, preferential treatment, sometimes preferential pricing.

but they all pay me a minimum of $3,500 a year to be a part of the program. The highest tier we offer is $7,500. We have about 120 vendors in our program. So before we even sell a house, we’re profitable. And these vendors set up and take care of our clients at all the seasons of their homeownership needs, as well as take care of our agents. So all of our ideal client profiles within Amy Stockberger Real Estate, buyers and sellers, Real Estate agents, and vendors.

are all serving each other in a circle that keeps going back around, that serve, serve, serve, helping each other on each side of it. And then the sales naturally follow. It’s the go giver. That’s the foundation of the book, Go Giver. And it was one of the books that I read back when I was fixing that hole in our business in 14. I’m like, oh, because the theme is that if you do serve first, the sales will be there. And they just do.

Dylan Silver (11:52)
Yeah. Go give her.

Yeah, and it’s really, you know, the idea of being a go-giver, and we say that a lot here at the show, especially when everyone else is looking at it from the perspective of, hey, I need this to happen kind of now, right? Like, hey, where’s the marketing dollars that I’m putting in and where’s my ROI? If you’re renting equipment, right, and they’re perfectly happy in their current home, that might not be something that’s a 30, 60, 90-day ROI.

Amy Stockberger (12:24)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (12:37)
but it’s a long-term play, right? And so when you’re putting in, I see a thought percolating here.

Amy Stockberger (12:43)
Well, no, I don’t agree with that because these are human trust referrals from friends and family 92 % more than any other form of marketing or advertising. What we’re doing is creating walking, talking billboards for us.

Because they’re running into people in their sphere. is it, like, 40-some percent of your sphere is going to transact in the next 12 months with how our market is right now? So even though we have people who are in those great low interest rates, ⁓ they know somebody who has a have-to situation or a life change coming up. So what we’re doing is making sure, using the Gary Keller rule of thumb that he wrote out in the Millionaire Real Estate Agent that

Humans have two places in their brains for Real Estate agents. Your job is to always kick that other person’s name out so that when somebody in their sphere has a life change, you’re the brand they’re talking about. That’s what this does is that our program turns one client into five more. that, yeah, and it just gives a referral after referral after referral because they’re so happy with you that they want everybody in their tribe to come work with us too. And it’s brand awareness on steroids too.

Dylan Silver (13:40)
Expanding your sphere.

Amy Stockberger (13:53)
Way better than in film.

Dylan Silver (13:53)
Yeah, you’ve got a permanent permanent

place in their their their heads when they’re thinking about a Real Estate purchase, because whether it’s they themselves or they were at an event where they saw your branding, you’ve now got, their attention. ⁓ Pivoting here, though, you mentioned building a sellable Real Estate business. This is something that a lot of people aren’t sure how to do right ⁓ without giving away all of the gold, Amy, but maybe a little nugget here.

Amy Stockberger (13:59)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Dylan Silver (14:21)
If someone has a team and they’ve had a handful of people on the team for years producing and they’re maybe thinking about, maybe one day I would like to sell this as a ⁓ business and sell to someone either from within my brokerage or however that would work, what are the steps that they need to do in order to sell their team?

Amy Stockberger (14:44)
Well, I think the first thing they need to do is systemize it. Well, first, say that’s the second thing, but they need to make sure that it’s actually a business that they can walk away from. If your business is something that pumps without you, then it’s an actual business. But if it’s something that requires you to be in it day in and day out, then you have a job. And so you have to make sure that you first are building ⁓ a referable relationship-based business. I feel that service-centric. That’s going to be your best way that you’re going to keep people coming back to your brand.

And then you need to systemize it. You have to have a system inside. I call it keeping your business sad. Systemize, automate, delegate, and delete. Everything in your business needs to run through that filter. How can you do that? How can you systemize it? How can you automate it? Who can you delegate it to, or can you simply delete it? And a systemized business like that is going to be worth more as well, because again, it’s an actual asset that you’re walking away from.

You can cut it up 20 different ways on how you sell it out, what the terms are on it. ⁓ But one thing you need to be looking at is what is your business worth right now to you? What is it with what you’re making on it? What are you willing to? How long do you want to stay in it, if that’s going to part of the deal, that you’re going to be working in it? If not, typically not. And for teams who are wanting to, ⁓ I guess side note on this, are wanting to pick up relationship-based business, which is one of the easiest market shares to grab.

think about all the agents in your market who are maybe going to exit in the next five years. Because according to NAR stats, 44 % of everybody in NAR is over the age of 60, 60 or older, I think is what the stat is. So think about that. The silver tsunami is everywhere, right? So think about if you as a team are wanting to grab relationship business, referral business, go approach those agents. What does it look like for them? Where do they want to be in five years?

With our program, what I teach teams and brokers, go out and get those agents, those hybrid agents who are half in, half out, get them in, get them using all of my systems, my VIP club, my vendor, get their clients used to that so that when they do fully step out, they’re already completely transplanted into the new agents, the new broker, the new teams book of business.

Dylan Silver (17:37)
You mentioned automations. I think everyone is talking about automations, especially with everything that’s going on with tech and with AI. What specifically on a granular level can people be doing to implement some type of automations in their Real Estate team?

Amy Stockberger (17:55)
my gosh, that’s such a delicious question. we’re unapologetically AI first. The rule at my office is that if our staff isn’t using AI first, they’re being irresponsibly unproductive, and that doesn’t align with our core values. So we automate nearly everything. We automated about 70 % of our workflow last year. We have automations for, here’s the easiest one. Let’s go back to text replacements. I talk about this on keynotes. We automate so our agents don’t have to type. My agents, when they’re on board with us,

they get a cheat sheet for them to put into their phones so that they can system or automate the small thing. So a client contacts them, wants to start the process. They simply have to type out BYRE, and it auto-populates two paragraphs of what the next steps look like. Same with the seller. Same with every step of the process. So we automate little things like that. And we do the same thing for our Mac users. Anything they create on their iPhone, go straight to your Mac for a shortcut.

But Text Blaze is a solution you can use ⁓ on desktop that does the exact same thing. saves our staff who have desktops a ton of time. So little things like that, starting at that, where can you automate and shave off three seconds, three minutes? And we’ve gone in and automated, like Claude, I joke, I say this from stage two, but I wonder if Claude thinks about me as much as I think about her, because I think about her a lot. ⁓ yeah, I say there’s.

Dylan Silver (19:15)
We’re big quad users at the show here as well.

Amy Stockberger (19:19)
There really isn’t my ops right now. I bet you she has five different tabs open of Claude right now. right now Claude’s going through all of our admin staff that we didn’t automate last year and automating the rest of it. So we had 1,639 tasks we didn’t automate last year. She’s automated about 539 of them that we’re going through and finding different ways for things to trigger, whether it’s with Claude code making it trigger or if we’re setting up some things on make.com to have that trigger. We’re automating.

We automated some Sky Slope voicemail drops today for our VIP club. We’re automating as many things as we possibly can, and not to get rid of FTEs, full-time equivalents, but to take the humans I have and put them in, help them be more enriched, because it is more enriched than doing Taskmaster stuff, serve at a higher level, add more experience, higher levels of experience for our clients and for our agents. That’s where the win is. The more we can add onto that,

Dylan Silver (19:51)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Amy Stockberger (20:15)
the better we all are. And I’m wildly passionate about changing our industry into a tribe of servipaneurs, not entrepreneurs, but servipaneurs who elevate that client experience before, during, and forever. And if we do that, if we’re really focused on the consumer at the highest level, everything else falls into place. It falls into place for the agents. It falls in place for the team leads. It falls in place for the brokers. And the brokers are the ones who need the most help. Most of the brokers nationwide.

Dylan Silver (20:36)
Yeah, I agree.

Amy Stockberger (20:44)
need a lot of help, their profitability is so tough. It’s next to nothing. Our industry is so dynamic. Every single day, something new is happening. And ⁓ being able to adopt a model where you’re serving your clients and your agents at the highest level and adding in additional revenue streams, that’s the win.

Dylan Silver (21:06)
curious to get your feedback, you know, talking about AI and Claude about like voice agents and, know, the speed to lead and if someone is unavailable for whatever reason at the time that they’re getting a call and the way that that’s handled, what’s your feedback on all that voice agents and, you know, auto responders and that type of thing?

Amy Stockberger (21:25)
⁓ we have a, ⁓ an employee, digital employee named ACE who’s being built right now. He’ll have voice. He’s going to be more of a concierge, but he’ll be, he’ll be, he’ll start with that. I’m the AI, I’m ACE, ⁓ AI assistant at AIME, AI concierge at AIME Stockberger Real Estate just reminding you of da da da da da, like we’re launching our lifetime home hub. So he’ll be, he’ll be providing value like that. And I think as long as you’re, you are open and honest that this is not a human.

like this is an AI voice and this is who you’re dealing with. And I think that there’s plenty of, ⁓ not to say grace, but people understand it. Like, OK, great, thanks. Thanks for the update. I appreciate that. And then like, hey, let me get you over to our inside sales. Or let me get you over to the department that you wanted to get to.

Dylan Silver (22:13)
I think this is

particularly useful when folks are operating outside of normal hours. If someone is just up late at night and they’re looking at purchasing a home and they want some instant feedback, we’re effectively at a point where we could download our collective or upload our collective knowledge to a AI chat tool that will have a majority of the information that people may need like off the cuff. And then when the conversation is picked up,

the next business day or the next day, then they can get face to face time or on the phone with someone who’s not an AI ⁓ tool. But for that initial, you know, first couple questions, I think it can be super helpful.

Amy Stockberger (22:56)
100%. And so we have, OK, to speak about the human part, this isn’t voice, but we created Sammy. She was our first digital employee that lives inside of Microsoft Teams. To stop the search spiral for my agents, and Sammy’s 24-7 agent support, she knows our language, she knows our inside jokes, she talks about things that we talk about in media, and she’s hooked up to all of our knowledge base of everything. So we transitioned out of TerrainUl, great software.

But training learning software where all of our SOPs, our checklists, everything lived. But our agents would get this search spiral in that. They’d go in there and they’d search for, where do I sign up for an open house? ⁓ What do I do with the VUC if there’s a home sale contingent? Things like that. They would find all the different things that tagged that and it would just become overwhelming. Well, we hooked Sammy up and we built Sammy into Microsoft Teams, is our portal of our communication portal. And she can speak.

to it very quickly, provide them, throw them out the PDFs they need and speak in a way that’s more human and understanding to them or refer them back to leadership right away. So they’re feeling like they’re getting served. ⁓ She doesn’t have voice, said, but the human way that she talks to them and can relate to them has helped us in helping them be supported. And there is, of course, Hey Jen and 11 Labs and like we’ve done all those videos. There’s a ton of videos that are me. There’s a ton of videos that sound like me.

I have a, once a week, my agents get a email from, I pull, don’t, code pulls all this information from ⁓ what happened in Sioux Falls business, like that they need to know. Hooked up to, you know, what happened in Dumson, everything that happened in the Real Estate market from the last week. What happened, what’s my buddy Logan at HousingWire saying, you know, what did he tell us? What’s Myron Lazeen telling us we need to know out there? What’s happening with our client events? What team, you know, meetings do they not need to meet? And I,

Throw it into a thing. It’s a live artifact link that they get, and it gets sent to them. But at the very top, it says, here, do you want to hear me tell you about it? And in my voice, in 11Lab’s voice, it’s just me summarizing it in case they don’t want to read it, because I know they’re not going to read it. You know what I mean? It’s me like, hey, this is what happened, talking like me. In the way I talk, it’s cutie patootie. They know the words I’m going to use. They know the inflections of things. Here, it’s more human, even though it’s not.

Dylan Silver (25:02)
Yeah.

You you mentioned using it for internal, right? And I think there’s a level of decision fatigue I’ve heard this term used where people are trying within an organization to solve a problem, or they may be a newer agent, if they’re a realtor, right? And they are feeling discouraged because they’re getting maybe some obstacles or reaching some barriers or, you know, my broker is only available during these hours. Well, if you have this tool that is going to give, you know, your

people within your organization, access to some basic information that they might have a question, but they’re newer, that is so useful because it enables them to not feel like out on their own if it is outside of normal working hours. And they can get access to some reliable information as opposed to just doing a Google search at this point or a chat GPT search. It’s huge to be able to download almost like the owner’s manual for how we operate to that type of tool.

Amy Stockberger (26:12)
Totally, totally. It’s a delicious time to be alive. It just is. It’s a delicious time to build a business. Thinking of where we are today compared to where we were 18 months ago is hilarious. We were doing what? It seems like Fred Flintstone times. You know what I mean? just like, it does. And one thing that…

Dylan Silver (26:31)
True. Yeah.

Amy Stockberger (26:36)
we’ve been trying to get to in our business is to get a four day work week for our staff, for most of our staff. And we’ll probably be there by 2027 and just have a rotating four day. And again, not that we were getting rid of a ton of staff, we just automated and systematized even to a higher level where the service levels were even getting higher. like one thing, like one of my faults as a leader is I over systematize.

I over-serve and over-systematize. So our checklist for our transaction coordination, stupid. Stupid amount of things on there. Because every mistake I’ve ever made as an agent, every mistake I’ve ever seen another agent made, anything that could possibly happen lived within those checklists. And before we had this delicious AI, the joke was that when I’d say checklist, they’d say drinks. I said checklist so much. Like they’re living, breathing entities to me, right? And so I never wanted to give up these things that live in my TC, which meant I always had a higher fee, higher expenses in my transaction coordination department.

⁓ because I refused to give that service up. Well, we went in and we hired an AI consultant last year to systematize ⁓ that TC department. And I will have that entire thing, it’s so beautiful, running and we were adding in more levels of service actually by what we’re automating in. But then we’re turning it into software that I’m gonna be able to help agents and teams, teams and brokers do the same thing, like help your agents.

Dylan Silver (27:34)
Yeah.

Amy Stockberger (27:59)
have this level that lives in here of service at the nth level, because communication, communication cubed is one of our core values. We over communicate everything. Every part of the transaction, get.

Dylan Silver (28:05)
Yeah.

Amy Stockberger (28:10)
told how it goes from their agent, but then they also get a video of me explaining it again, the major sections, like the seasons of the contract, just to make sure everybody takes in information differently. And so we just didn’t want to let go of all these and all these other things that we add into it that we didn’t want to let go of that now with AI, we’re able to do so much more.

Dylan Silver (28:30)
I’m with you. If I had to choose between,

you know, quote unquote, over communicate or communicate what seems like sufficiently, but I might potentially be missing some things in certain times. I’d rather give more than enough. And if some people are like opting out at that point, as long as it’s not an overwhelming amount, then I’m fine with that because that’s where these miscues happen is in the communication. Hey, we’ve got this checklist for our transaction.

and this one thing we missed this one time, well, turns out that’s the one time that we really needed it, right?

Amy Stockberger (29:03)
Totally. ⁓ Silly one that I created that a long time ago that we still use is the before going live checklist. it’s like, so you’re sitting down and you’re telling your sellers every single thing that could possibly happen that’s going to suck. It’s going to be terrible. These are things that I’ve seen. ⁓ Your house is going to, the light’s going to be on, the door is going to be unlocked, the sign’s going to get blown over. People are going to want to see it. They’re not going to show up. They’re going to come in. They’re going to tell you your house sucks. They hate it. It stinks.

all these things, over communicating how this works. So then their expectations are adjusted. And when those things don’t happen, great. But you sat down and say, here’s what’s going to possibly happen so I can adjust it for you. we also turn that into a video. So my agents have the checklist to go through during the paperwork time that they’re communicating it. Then they get another video of me saying it, like, hey, we’re going to get it sold. This is what’s going to happen. I just want to make sure you understand every part of it, because we live in a world that’s going to go through the whole thing.

So again, it’s just another way to over communicate their expectations because uncommunicated expectations, it just causes so much, so much havoc.

Dylan Silver (29:59)
Yeah.

That’s huge. And I think a lot of people

have some level of fear around those conversations because they’re like, well, I don’t want to say what could go wrong. But the way that you just said it is perfect and really is a template for how everybody should should approach it. We are coming up on time here, Amy. Any new projects that you’re working on or anything you’d like to tell directly to our audience?

Amy Stockberger (30:18)
Right.

Yeah, so I have lots, but I’ll go quick. So we’re just launching a Lifetime Home Hub, which is a homeowner AI product. It’s white labeled, but it’s a, I call it Lifetime On Demand that we’re offering for our clients where they can go in. It’s a whole hub for everything in their house. So from every inventory of furnace, AC, ⁓ microwave, their…

radon mitigation system, all inventory, every receipt, everything they can have, every document can live in there, has direct access to all of our vendors in it. So they want to have something done with their ⁓ gutters that need to be ⁓ cleaned out before fall. They can hit a button and go straight to my vendors because we have 120-some vendors. So it’s a great, great product for our clients, great product for attraction, great product for my vendors. And it’s allowing us to add in another level of revenue stream for putting this product in place.

And we do have a solution for teams and brokerages as well. because I’ve run our program at such a high level and we have a systematized, I built out a lifetime vendor operating system and a lifetime client operating system that’s done for you. And we come in and monetize the heck out of it. If you’re going to do a VIP club, we have the whole playbook on how to monetize a VIP club at a high level where we can ROI this usually within 90 days. And then the vendor program, sky’s the limit, we come in and

It’s customized for every market, for each team’s goals. We’re the ones going out and onboarding the vendors into the program, taking care of everything with it. You can get access to the details at lifetimehomesupport.com and reach out to me. Would love to ⁓ go in and meet with you and do a one-on-one to see if we’re a fit to help you keep clients for life, keep agents for life, and add in high levels of revenue stream and change the industry with me. Let’s elevate that client experience.